Chapter 46
E very day for the next six weeks, my life bleeds together into one eternal day.
Sleep evades me in the night, overcomes me in the daytime, but I am often woken to the sound of screams. I can’t know how many times I’ve startled awake, thinking it’s my newborn calling to me, begging to be fed or changed. But my breasts have long since dried up.
When I come to my senses, it’s usually only to the howling of the wind—or perhaps someone mumbling, or Maddox scooting a chair out from underneath the table, accidentally causing it to screech.
Sometimes it’s the healer, causing the door to creak as he enters the cottage to check on Charlie, who has yet to waken, at least not to full consciousness.
They’re able to spoon-feed her, and she murmurs occasionally, swallowing her food and water, but we haven’t heard a word out of her, nor has she opened her eyes any more than a slit of white just between the lids.
I ask the healer every day, and every day, the healer’s answer is the same. He is not a miracle worker, nor is he a seer. He cannot predict the outcome of our friend’s life any more than we can predict the weather.
A few weeks ago, the crew brought Michael to stay with us in the cottage. He’s been sleeping in the guest room with me and Nolan, snuggling between us at night.
Sometimes it’s him speaking that wakes me up. Since he’s been here, I’ve found his warmth a comfort.
Nolan plays with him during the day, but I can hardly stand to watch them together. Hardly stand to consider what my husband must be thinking, as he plays with another’s child while his own boy grows and feeds and sleeps elsewhere.
This is all my doing. That is the cadence, the mantra in my head.
I am my parents, and I have done exactly the thing for which I hated them. Except I’m worse than my parents. They never actually handed me over to the monster. It was not their hands that clasped onto Peter’s.
It was mine. And willingly.
There have been a few times when I’ve considered whether there might be any faerie dust in the village just a mile away. It plays on my mind, calling to me. Though there’s a shortage, surely there are still people peddling it on the streets as they would any drug.
I’ve plotted and debated how I would get my hands on some. All it would take would be stealing the money from Nolan’s coin purse and sneaking into town in the middle of the night.
I’ve done it—executed the plan a thousand times in my mind.
The problem is willing my legs to move. They are made of lead. These days, I can hardly bring myself to get off of the couch. The effort it would take to push myself into standing, when it takes everything in me to sit upright for Nolan to bring me meals… it’s overwhelming.
It’s on one of these days—after a checkup with the healer, who informs me that at least I’ve healed from the physical trauma of labor—that Michael shakes me awake from a nap.
“We sleep at nighttime,” he says.
These weeks have been so similar to my time in Neverland in the week following John’s death.
Here I have people who love me, to comfort me. I have my husband. But the guilt I feel in his presence—for stealing away his joy, for the fact that he’s trapped with me now, when he must hate me, resent me on the inside—makes his presence less than a comfort.
“Get up,” says Michael.
His voice is stern, and though he’s still only a boy, it has the tone of one imitating a man. He’s deepened it, almost as if to sound like Nolan.
“Get up.”
And then I’m not back in my cot in Neverland anymore, but on the floor of the Iaso , wrists bruised, Nolan having just knocked me to the ground in a failed attempt to teach me to defend myself.
“Get up,” says Michael again.
The tone he says it in is so strikingly similar to that day on the ship with Nolan, it’s almost shocking. As if Michael overheard the entire event, though he would have been a realm away.
“I can’t get up, Michael,” I tell him. “But I can play with you, if you bring your toys to the bed.”
This time, a fist connects with my shoulder, causing a twinge of pain and what I believe will amount to a bruise.
“Ow,” I say, grabbing my shoulder and rolling over to face my brother.
His face flashes. His tone hardens, determined. I expect him to say “get up” again.
Instead, he says, “Time to go get baby nephew.”
I frown, my heart dropping into my stomach. I never told Michael I was to have a baby.
Then Nolan marches in, full shock on his expression. Apology, even.
“I’m sorry, Darling,” he says. “I’ve been telling him…” He pauses, his face looking blank. “I shouldn’t have talked to him about any of this.”
My heart sinks. Because who else would Nolan have talked to if not me, curled up in the bed, Maddox constantly by Charlie’s side?
“Michael’s a good confidant,” I say.
Nolan puts his hand on the back of his neck and turns around to leave. I don’t have the energy to ask him to stay.
“Michael, dear,” I whisper, and a tear slides down my cheek. “I’m sad about it too, buddy.”
He turns around and pads over to the doorway, where his shoes are displayed. A tripping hazard, certainly. He leans over, fiddling with them, trying to get them on. Watching him struggle evokes a deep aching within me.
His foot finally slips into the shoe.
“Yes,” he says, not at all sounding excited.
He then wrestles with the other one until, finally, he gets it on. Then he stands tall, shoulders squared.
“Time to go get baby nephew,” he says again.
And looks at me as if to say, I put my shoes on for this.
The next morning, I’m woken to raised voices echoing in from outside the cottage.
Sleep last night had been fitful, but in the early morning hours, I had finally succumbed, even if it was full of horrific dreams. I stir, pulling the knit blanket back over my shoulders, but as the shouting rouses me from my disoriented state, I begin to recognize the voices.
It’s Maddox and Nolan.
The strangeness of hearing them argue, especially at that level, brings me back to reality.
Getting out of the bed feels like it takes every muscle in my body.
My limbs are lead as I shuffle over to the window.
It’s cracked just barely. Nolan must have opened it last night to let the breeze into the often stuffy cottage.
From the window, I can see the shed where the fishing boat is kept. Nolan and Maddox are outside its door, arms crossed like shields in front of them.
“If you have something to say, say it against me, not her,” says Nolan.
“You’re both the same anyway,” says Maddox.
“Neither of you can stand the circumstances in which you’ve been placed.
Neither of you can just simply be content or figure things out on your own.
You make deals with the Fates. You make bargains with those cleverer than yourselves with no regard for how they might affect others.
Over and over again, I’ve watched the two of you put yourselves in precarious positions, and I’ve never said a word.
“But if you think it’s just your lives you’re holding up for collateral, you’re more dense than I thought.
How many people have to get hurt? Charlie is laying in there fighting for her life,” Maddox’s voice breaks, “and I don’t know that she’s going to win that battle.
No matter what words of encouragement you try to play off as the truth, you don’t know that either.
You’re not the master of your own fate, and you’re certainly not the master of hers. ”
“I care for you both. I don’t mean to make it seem as if I don’t. I’m so sorry,” says Nolan. “Wendy and I were just trying to protect each other. Protect our family.”
Maddox’s eyes go wide. “Can’t you see that that’s all I wanted too? To protect the two of you? To protect your family? But we failed, Nolan. Your son—we couldn’t protect him. Not in the end. But Charlie—there was no reason for her to get hurt.”
“Charlie knew what she was signing up for when she sided with us against a Fate,” says Nolan.
Maddox clenches his jaw, turning his face away.
“I don’t know that she did. Charlie, despite all she’s been through, is so good.
She only sees the best in people. Do you think it ever crossed her mind that she would be fighting to stay on this side of the realms because of a bullet fired from her own pistol by her best friend? ”
“I think Charlie would have died for our son’s safety,” says Nolan.
“But your son isn’t safe,” says Maddox. “Perhaps I could bear it if he was. Or perhaps if it had been the Sister who fired the shot. I just need time.”
“Time for what?”
“I can’t be in the same house with her .” The vitriol with which he says that last word makes me think he’s not talking about Charlie.
“You’re leaving then?” asks Nolan.
Maddox looks at him as if he’s lost his mind. “Of course not. I’m not leaving Charlie. I’ll stay and take care of her until…” His voice trails off. “Well. Until she doesn’t need to be taken care of anymore.”
“So you’re asking us to leave?” says Nolan. “You’re telling us to leave?”
Maddox’s entire stance almost melts, and his voice softens.
“No, Nolan. I’m asking you—as my friend. Wendy’s hardly recovered from labor, and… well, I don’t know how much recovering there will be from what else she’s experienced.”
“We’ve experienced,” says Nolan.
“You said she’s healing up nicely,” says Maddox.
When Nolan gives him a strange glance, Maddox shrugs.
“I overheard what the healer told you. Her mind’s more broken than her body.
But what he told her—not to exert herself for six weeks, not to strain, to stay in bed—I’m not asking for her to journey horseback across the country.
I’m asking for you to get her on a boat and take her back to the ship. She can rest in your cabins there.”
“I can’t move her.”
“Yes, you can.”
“And what do you think Charlie would want?”
“That’s the thing. Charlie doesn’t get to tell us what she would want, does she?” asks Maddox. “Wendy took that away from her.”
Of all of them, it’s these words that pierce my heart.
I glance backward down the hall where my friend lies sleeping in a room, in a slumber I’m not confident she’ll ever wake up from.
I’ve considered it—what Charlie’s response might be when she wakes.
If I could guarantee that she wanted me here, I would say I wouldn’t leave her side until she woke up.
But Maddox is right. Charlie doesn’t get to tell us what she wants.
And if she is going to die, there’s something about the idea of having the person who murdered her at her bedside that feels insulting.
I think I could handle it if she woke and hated me—if she saw me and screamed for me to get out.
But if she passes from this life to the next, and she wouldn’t have wanted me there…
I don’t know if I can carry that question with me for the rest of my life.
Whether or not I unknowingly dishonored what would have been her last wishes.
“I’m not moving her until she’s ready,” says Nolan. “I’m sorry, Maddox.”
I slip out the door and pad toward them. I see both men flinch when they hear me coming. I pause a good distance away.
“How much did you overhear?” asks Nolan.
“Enough,” I say.
“We don’t have to go yet,” Nolan says.
“But Maddox is right. I don’t know if Charlie will want me here when she wakes up.
And I took away any chance she had of asking me if I—but never mind that.
This place—” I look around at the beautiful cottage behind me, the one that was supposed to hold my last lovely memories with my husband.
There’s nothing about this beach that is comforting now.
Only six weeks ago, I could look out upon it and see the waves, the sea stretching for miles without a soul in sight. It felt peaceful.
Now it just feels empty, echoing my wound. Empty as my arms and my breasts. But then I think of Michael. Michael, who simply assumes that there’s strength within me.
I take a breath, then turn to Nolan, setting my brow. “I’m getting our son back.”
Nolan blinks. Works his jaw. He looks me up and down, assessing me, and I know what his assessment will find. Weakness that goes deeper than my body needing to recover from labor. Perhaps he believes that my mind has finally split open.
“Darling, you’re still recovering. I know your heart is broken. Mine is as well, but…”
“Even so, I’m getting him back.”
Nolan must glimpse the determination in my stance, because he closes his mouth and nods, eyes watering.
“Of course we’re getting him back,” says a voice from behind us.
Maddox’s head jerks up.
I spin around.
Charlie is standing in the doorway, leaning against it with one hand, looking pale, but upright. “And Maddox, surely you’re not leaving?”
“Charlie,” I say, “I’m so, so sorry.” I want nothing more than to run to my friend, but again I hesitate, partly because I’m afraid I’ll touch her and injure her further. Partly because I’m not sure where we stand.
She waves her hand at me, still clutching her injured side. Hopefully she hasn’t reopened the wound by getting up, and hopefully she’s not gripping her side because she’s trying to keep her bandage on.
But I wouldn’t put it past her.
“You know, I always did want to know how much it would hurt,” she says. “I was always just too cowardly to ask anyone to actually shoot me. I must say, I did pretty good.”
Then Charlie’s eyes roll back in her head, and she collapses.