Neverworld Wake(77)

I’d missed their funerals. I’d been in the hospital. So I read about them. All their hometown newspapers did follow-ups to the tragedy (because the initial articles had racked up hundreds of Shares and Likes), featuring photos of some red-eyed family member reading a poem in a church pulpit. The blown-up, framed picture of Kipling/Cannon/Martha/Whitley stared out from the easel beside them, their unwitting happiness and total lack of understanding of what was to come a powerful reminder that life, among many things, was all hairpin curves.

Linda Tolledo speaks during a service for her daughter, Whitley Lansing, who died in a car accident.

There was even an ongoing memorial of flowers, photos, candles, and teddy bears being left on the side of the coastal road at the crash site. People took pictures of it and posted them with hashtags like #rip and #neverforget.

They never suffered, the police told my mom and dad. They all died on impact.

I survived because I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt. I’d gotten tossed out, landing in a cluster of bushes, while the others were trapped in the car as it barreled down the ravine.

Little did anyone know the real reason that I’d survived: I had lived a century inside a second. I had died thousands of times, learned about and loved four people in a way few ever had the chance. I had called a place home where details such as life and death didn’t matter, where what did matter were the trembling moments of connection in between.

And afterward, you felt nothing but awe for every second of your little life.



* * *



—

So began life outside the Neverworld.

It was different from what I remembered. I was different.

And it wasn’t just the scar of a reverse question mark wrapping around my skull above my right ear. My hair hid the scar, but it was there if you looked for it, my tattoo, my memento. To outsiders I seemed confident, if a little solemn. I was less prone to biting my lip and tucking my hair behind my ears. I no longer worried whether people liked me, or whether I was pretty or had made a mistake. I wasn’t afraid to eat in a crowded cafeteria at a table alone or talk to a cute boy I didn’t know, or to sing karaoke, audition, give a speech. All the things people spend so much time worrying about in this world—the Neverworld had unchained me from all that. I was no longer in a hurry to fill silence. I could just let it sit forever like a bowl of fruit.

My parents’ friends whispered, “Beatrice has really come out of her shell,” and “You must be so relieved.” They marveled when they heard the news that I had transferred to Boston College, was majoring in music theory and art history, working part-time at a video game company, volunteering at a nonprofit that had people read books at bedtime to foster children.

It was those kids I told about the Neverworld Wake.

I told no one else, not even my mom and dad. Somehow I knew that those children, with their wide eyes and knowledge of the dark, their kingdoms of morning and hide-and-seek, naptime, and snack, that they, of everyone, would understand. I told them I’d visited the secretest, wildest wrinkle in all the world. That one day, they might find themselves in one too, some lost dreamland between life and death, where past, present, and future are a jungle and hell can become heaven in the blink of an eye.

“How do we go there?” a girl whispered.

“If you’re chosen, it’ll find you. But the trick is not to be afraid. Because it isn’t so different from this world after all.”

Had the Neverworld been real? Or had it been a side effect of my injury, the right-sided subdural hematoma requiring a craniotomy for evacuation, eleven days passed in a coma, intubated and sedated. Sam had read me the book. One of my physicians looked like the Keeper. Had it all been in my head? Had my senses, as I slept, pulled details from the boisterous world in motion around me, spinning it into a reality that existed only for me?

Of course the Neverworld had been real, though I could never prove it.

I tried to. I tried to corroborate all the secrets. I discovered that while some things did check out—Mrs. Kahn did live down the road from Wincroft with her collection of snow globes; there was an exclusive marina called Davy Jones’s Locker, a Ted Daisy who lived in Cincinnati, an Officer Channing at the Warwick police station who worked in traffic—others didn’t. There was no mention of Estella Ornato on the Internet. Honey Love Fried Chicken had once existed, but it had been replaced with a Foot Locker the year before. The White Rabbit, the Black-Footed Sioux Carpet—there was no way of verifying them.

So many of the dots we had connected could not be connected here.

The only real evidence of the Neverworld’s existence was time. It no longer ran in a straight line for me. Instead, now and then, it looped and lost its balance. An hour would pass in the blink of an eye. I’d sit down for a history lecture and my mind would wander so completely, the bell would ring and I’d realize in shock that everyone was packing up to leave, an entire class’s worth of notes scribbled across the dry-erase board, which seconds earlier had been bare.

I’d look around, wondering if the Keeper was nearby, standing in a flower bed planting tulips or atop a ladder trimming ivy, because I recognized this out-of-body interruption for what it was: aftershocks of the Neverworld, instability, just as Martha had warned. My locomotive was skidding ever so slightly along the tracks.

I still thought of Jim. But he was no longer the ghost who haunted me. I saw him as a boy, beautiful and unsteady like the rest of us. I saw our time together closer to what it probably was—something between the wild imagining of love and the real thing. Sometimes in that shaky in-between we found each other and it was real. Other times it trembled and broke like a wild kite with too fragile a string. If Jim hadn’t died, our love would have stopped and turned off the lights like the carousel in a traveling carnival, the music, played later, not as beautiful as I’d always thought. We would be barely remembered. In twenty years, we’d find each other on Facebook or whatever came after that, and we’d marvel at how ordinary we’d become, how all the glory we swore we’d seen in each other’s eyes was gone.