Chapter 4
“They forced you into an ice bath?” Wendy looked utterly mortified, which Alice found quite vindicating, especially as Wendy had just shockingly revealed that she had never even been required to see a doctor!
Had Alice been the one placed in the wing meant for the more severely afflicted women, after all?
“Oh, my goodness, Alice you are still damp! You must be freezing!” Wendy exclaimed, her warm brown eyes widening as she rubbed Alice’s arms before rummaging through a drawer for a woolen cape.
Alice scoffed, goosebumps prickling her skin.
“But it was Miss Marker, she was worse than the doctor. There is nothing that could explain her transformation, unless…” Wendy wrapped the cape around Alice as if dressing a small child.
“She has been possessed by…Satan,” Alice finished, shivering as she pulled her damp braid away from her neck.
Wendy took Alice’s cold hands in her warm ones, guiding her to sit on the cot while she knelt behind her. “It is so peculiar. Marker is nothing but a sweet church mouse.” Alice did not argue. This was her first chance in a very long time to make a friend.
What Alice did not mention was the smell. It had ridden home with them in the closed carriage—faint, sweetish, like a game larder in high summer. There was no way to say it that would not sound mad, and Alice was tired of sounding mad.
Wendy, with gentle hands, was unbraiding Alice’s hair. “Was it really so necessary that your entire head be submerged?” She hopped from the bed and retrieved a folded linen cloth to blot the water from Alice’s hair. “How can cold water do anything but leave you chilled?”
“That was my point exactly! But, Wendy, I am telling you, if you had seen her. She was unrecognizable and angry, irate even!” Alice said, her head tilting back as Wendy nimbly worked Alice’s hair into a new braid.
Wendy’s fingers crossed and gathered, crossed and gathered.
Alice’s scalp seemed to know the rhythm from somewhere—from before remembering—and for a moment she was very small, and very sleepy, and inexplicably safe.
How odd, she thought, that a stranger’s hands should carry that particular magic. She nearly said so. She didn’t.
“Perhaps it’s just a sour day,” Wendy said. She was so considerate. Too considerate, in this case. “We never know what others have been through or are presently going through.”
“Of course, that much is true, but still. You should have seen her eyes, Wendy. As though my afflictions were so grotesque that she wanted to drown me to rid the world of me!”
Wendy breathed sharply. “There,” she said, tying the blue ribbon on Alice’s braid before moving to sit and face her. “I hope this doesn’t sound odd, but, Alice, somehow it feels I know you.” Wendy squeezed Alice’s hands.
“Not at all! What is odd is that we’d been here all the while, and only now just met!” Alice would not yet bring up her questions about the difference between the wings.
“Oh, Alice. I do hope you’ll tell me everything about yourself,” Wendy said eagerly, and Alice had never felt so comforted as she did looking into Wendy’s dark eyes.
Some hours later, Alice found to her surprise that she had revealed to Wendy more about herself than she had ever told any psychoanalyst. The fact that Wendy had never been sent to see a doctor still seemed decidedly odd to Alice, and, as she grew more attached to the girl with each passing moment, she began to worry that Wendy might not want to be her friend, after all, if Alice was so clearly mad and Wendy so clearly the sane one.
The only explanation, it seemed clear, was that Wendy’s East Wing was for orphaned young women of a certain class, who needed to be protected at all costs from the world – and from the madwomen in Alice’s West Wing.
But if that was true, then why had Marker put them together now? Was Marker losing her mind, as well? That, too, seemed the only explanation.
“But Alice,” Wendy said, “in this short time, one can’t help but wonder, with so many failed attempts to ‘cure’ you, I have to ask…”
Alice took a quick breath. She knew what was coming.
“Why are you in here?”
Alice shrank at the question, though it made sense. They could only speak so long about being mad until they had to name the madness. But would she lose her new and only friend by sharing the truth? “Will you tell me what happened?” Wendy pressed gently.
Alice’s heart told her she wouldn’t lose Wendy—she couldn’t. And yet, she had always been so very good at losing people.
“If you’ll tell me the reason for your confinement?” Alice held Wendy’s gaze intently. She desperately wanted to know why anyone would surrender someone as gentle as Wendy to this place, or to anywhere.
Wendy smiled, and Alice felt the nervous excitement spark of a secret wanting to be shared.
“All right, then!” Alice chirped, and, though she immediately worried Wendy would know her bravado was false, she stood from the bed, smoothed her skirt, and plopped down on the floral brocade ottoman opposite Wendy.
Better to get it out all at once. “I saw a white rabbit who wore a pocket watch and led me to a world below ground, another land. It was called Wonderland, more specifically. Well—I dreamed I saw a white rabbit, I should say.”
Wendy’s eyes widened, and her mouth would’ve caught a fly. Alice suddenly felt ashamed.
But Wendy slowly shook her head and began to smile. “Is that all? You had a dream, and you were sent away?”
“Amongst other things,” Alice sniffed. Wendy gave her a skeptical squint, which was meant to get Alice to confess.
Alice stood and began to pace. The full truth, then.
“Wendy, the day I arrived here, I was convinced that, after my last visit to Wonderland, when I returned through my parlor mirror….”
Wendy covered her mouth briefly, appearing to be trying not to giggle. “You travel to this land through mirrors?” she said, then straightened and managed to appear serious again.
Alice sniffed again. She knew what she had experienced.
It was not a laughing matter. “I think perhaps just the mirror in my family’s parlor, or a rabbit hole.
I am not certain of the technicality, but when I returned through that mirror…
” Alice paused her pacing and planted her feet directly before Wendy, for effect.
“Forty-three years had passed.” Alice waited for Wendy to look shocked, or to laugh again.
But Wendy sat up even straighter. “What was the year when you went through the mirror?”
“It was 1858.”
“And when you returned?”
“1901,” Alice said with a nod.
“Fascinating.” Wendy’s mind seemed to be turning, and Alice began to feel reluctant.
“I missed the Great London Exposition!” Alice attempted to joke, but Wendy didn’t seem to find it amusing now, or perhaps Wendy was beginning to pity her.
“I know how it sounds, but my family was gone! Miss Molloy was just waiting there in my parlor, which was completely empty, except for the mirror. And I had only been gone a day! Mother and Father, long dead.” She hated how detached she sounded saying it, but she had dissected it over and over in her mind so much that its sentiment had lessened.
“Miss Molloy retrieved you?” Wendy asked, and Alice nodded. “What did she have to say of this time traveling mirror?”
“My imagination’s way of shielding me from the pain of abandonment,” Alice said, as though it was the obvious and only answer. It made sense, after all.
Wendy leaned close to Alice, her slender arms crossing over her knee. Alice, beckoned by her gracefulness, moved closer toward her and leaned in. “I believe you are raving mad, Alice Liddell,” Wendy whispered.
Alice felt a surge of relief as laughter escaped from both her and Wendy. “Wendolyn, you poke!” Alice swatted her knee, and Wendy grabbed hold of her hand as she calmed her laughter.
“Well, Alice, I don’t find you mad. I followed a flying boy to another land, as well, where children don’t age.
” She smirked as she rolled her eyes. “Neverland, more specifically,” she said, mimicking Alice’s proclamation of Wonderland.
“Now who is the mad one?” Wendy looked away, painfully trying to hide her embarrassment.
Alice could hardly contain her shock, and she found herself overjoyed at how similar their stories actually were.
“If we are to compare, I would say you, most certainly you! But what a coincidence, two women with two separate delusional worlds.” Wendy grinned, but pain lay beneath it.
Alice took both of Wendy’s hands and pulled her close. “Wendy.”
Wendy’s eyes were still averted. “Yes, Alice?”
“You may confide in me without changing a single opinion I have of you! Did you, in fact, go to Neverland? Was it real?” Alice hoped, for herself, it was real, for she wished for the answer to her own life’s mysteries to be, Yes, it was real.
Wendy’s eyes raised. Her face was solemn. “It is real. It was not a delusion.” Frustration swam beneath her words. Alice knew the place from which that came all too well.
“And the boy?”
“Oh, he was very real. He flew to my window, and I…” Wendy smiled quickly, then blushed, and quietly said his name. “Peter. He…” Wendy’s eyes were somehow brighter as she looked into Alice’s. “You’ll never believe this, but he could fly, honestly, and with him… so could I!”
Though this seemed unlikely, Alice could instantly tell that Wendy had felt something for Peter that Alice had never felt for anyone in her life. “Like a bird?” she asked, earnestly.
Wendy gave a slight nod. “In a way, though simpler. As if air had become water, and we floated through it.” The light in Wendy’s eyes began to dwindle. “I know how it all sounds. I still dream that he’ll come for me, that he looks for me, even after all this time…”
But who was Alice to say that Neverland wasn’t real, or that what Wendy so clearly believed had happened hadn’t happened? “I believe you, Wendy,” she declared. Wendy’s eyes suddenly welled with tears. Alice’s heart broke completely seeing Wendy cry, and she pulled Wendy’s thin frame into her arms.
“And your Wonderland,” Wendy said through her sniffles, as she rested her head against Alice. “Was it real?”
Alice thought how she might answer delicately, for Wendy had spoken of Neverland and Peter with such absolute certainty.
Certainty that Alice longed for. She stroked Wendy’s hair.
“No birthday gathering, no trip to the shore, no stay in this cuckoo’s nest, is more vivid in my mind than the memories or dreams of Wonderland.
” What did Alice believe? In the absence of certainty… “I hope it was real.”
Wendy began to softly hum. Alice listened to her broken voice through her waning sniffles. The tune was familiar, and something in Wendy’s voice felt oddly familiar to her as well, and, as a forgotten memory returned, so did the sweet lyrics of a childhood nursery rhyme.
“Merrily, merrily…” Alice sang to Wendy’s humming.
“Life is but a dream,” Wendy and she finished together.
Alice wished for a boat that she and Wendy could row together back to the worlds more real to them than the room in which they sat together. Wendy then continued to whisper the song to herself with a voice as broken as her heart.
“Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. If you see a crocodile, don’t forget to scream…” The childish words trailed from Wendy, chilling the air around Alice.