7. Everett
7
Everett
I stared after where the young man had disappeared into the woods, my head and heart aching, eyes stinging in a way that was almost entirely unfamiliar.
Was I crying?
I didn’t cry. How many times had my mother reminded me in my childhood that boys weren’t supposed to cry? I thought I’d gotten over the urge. I hadn’t even cried when Warren had taken credit for my work like I would have as a kid, those hot tears of frustrated anger and helplessness that used to boil over when something was hurtful and out of my control. Like when my parents had told me we were moving away from Cider Landing, and no, I didn’t have a say or any recourse.
But there it was, that familiar sensation, like something hot pricking at my eyes.
Why had he been so angry?
Don’t you dare say you don’t remember me, Everett Bailey .
Him? The boy? He looked like Peter, sure, but he couldn’t be Peter. It wasn’t possible. He was a preteen, or at most a teenager. He looked just like Peter had the last time I’d seen him, more than fifteen years ago. It simply wasn’t possible for a person to remain a teenager for that long.
My mind went back to Marsha at the grocery store.
The last Peter I knew in town was Peter Hawking .
He’d been old when she was a child, she’d said. Still, it was a place to start, and since the boy was gone, and I was no kind of runner—I loved myself too much for that brand of torture, thank you very much—I wasn’t going to chase after him.
So instead, I went into the house and opened my laptop.
It took a moment, since I also had to hunt down my charger, but thankfully, the electricity in the house worked just fine, so once I found my stuff, I got right down to business, researching Peter Hawking in Cider Landing.
It hardly took any effort at all, because the man truly had done impressive things, and even had his own Wikipedia page. He’d spent a long career as a doctor championing mental health among a class of people who often ignored it even now, a hundred years later. He’d been a literal contemporary of Sigmund Freud, born in the late eighteen-fifties, so he’d been doing this during the birth of the idea of psychology as a science.
Most of the pictures available of him online were like Freud’s when he was older, with gray hair and sad, knowing eyes.
But there, tucked into the article about his life, was one photograph of him in his early twenties, with a forlorn older woman who stared off into space to one side of the camera, while he looked at her. The paragraph under the picture said it was Peter and his mother Eloise, circa eighteen-eighty, soon after his father’s death.
Peter’s mother believed that her son had been taken away by the fairies, the article said, and she never acknowledged him, his work, or the care he took of her, claiming that he was a changeling the fairies had left in her son’s place, and that she could still see “the real Peter” sometimes, playing in the woods.
The article would have simply been sad, if it hadn’t been for Peter Hawking. In the black and white photo, you could only tell that his hair and eyes were dark, but the elfin features, sharp nose, chin, and cheekbones, were unmistakable.
The twenty-something young man could have been a clone of my Peter, just a few years older. My Peter, who had spent the entire time I knew him playing in the woods.
By some impossible miracle of technology, the printer on the desk in my grandmother’s office still had ink in it, and even more shocking, it connected to my computer and worked. On the first try. It was almost like when an actor in a movie put a USB drive into a computer, and you couldn’t help but roll your eyes because it just automatically went in on their first try, and they didn’t have to flip it over, and then flip it over again when it still didn’t fit.
Either way, it only took about ten minutes before I managed to print out a copy of the picture of Peter Hawking and his mother, full size. Then I sat and stared at it for a long time.
It was him. It wasn’t a man who could have been his brother, or his father, or anything so simple and explainable. It was Peter.
No one else would have the exact same features, unless they were fucking twins, and given that Doctor Hawking had lived from eighteen fifty-seven to nineteen fifty-three, well...twins wasn’t really a rational option either.
So what was?
Magic?
Motherfucking fairies, kidnapping Eloise Hawking’s son and replacing him with a different baby, and Peter, my Peter , spending the last hundred and sixty years playing in the woods, never aging?
It would explain why he’d been so pissed about me asking for his father. Because if I was Everett and he was Peter and I was asking for someone other than him, that was awful and hurtful. It made my heart twist just to think about it; the idea that seeing my best friend again for the first time in so long, I might have asked for his father while looking right at him.
But also, it was ridiculous. Fairies weren’t real and magic didn’t exist and Peter was my age. He was thirty. Not still fourteen, and not a hundred and sixty-seven.
I was losing my mind. That was the problem. Peter wasn’t a fae kidnapee who hadn’t aged since before my great-grandmother was born.
Yes, mental illness was a much better explanation.
Grabbing one of the bottles of wine I’d bought at the store and uncorking it, I didn’t bother to grab a glass before heading out to the back porch and sitting there on the rickety old swing with my printed picture and my bottle.
Maybe the boy would come back, and I’d be able to get a real explanation out of him. Or maybe the boy didn’t exist, and I’d imagined him up because I missed my best friend.
Or maybe...maybe Peter had never existed, and my parents had dragged me out of Cider Landing kicking and screaming because they’d been worried I was imagining up friends who didn’t even exist. Friends who looked like doctors who’d died of old age forty years before I was born.