Epilogue The Truth & The Beginning
EPILOGUE
The Truth they had only retreated, to places and times she did not know.
Roquat. Mombi. Was it really true that Mombi would not find Alice some other way, in some other time, this time?
“With such uncertainty, why will you not give me any answers?” Alice asked, touching the mirror and looking at herself, covered in dirt and sweat-streaked from the day. The linen at her throat had come down to a single band. Beneath it were two lines that would stay.
“Of which I owe you many,” the voice, Tattypoo’s voice, said at her back. Alice turned. Tattypoo’s eyes were red. She sniffed, wiping away tears as she entered the room. “What I have done is unforgivable,” she said, lowering her head.
Though Alice agreed that yes, it was terrible, she said to Tattypoo, “It is not unforgivable.” She meant it. “You believed you were doing the right thing.” Alice was convinced this was true. “But keeping me from here, from this, from myself… it’s left a lifetime of questions for me to solve.”
“Oh my,” Tattypoo said placing her hand on Alice’s face.
“What a lousy grandmother I have been.” Alice smiled faintly; how strange it sounded.
“But I will make it right. Wendy,” she said, taking a breath.
“I have confessed all to Peter.” She shook her head.
“And rightfully so, he is…” She chuckled slightly through what was very clearly painful embarrassment.
“More angry than you are, if you could believe.” She shuddered, trying to shake away the apparent shame that gripped her.
“He will find her. He has already left to do so.”
“I can’t go with him?” Alice said.
Tattypoo took Alice by her hand. “I knew you would ask this. Neverland is not what it once was, and given you seem to make enemies faster than Peter does, it’s best you stay back—and learn how use this gift you have.
” Tattypoo allowed a slight smirk to come across her face, and Alice did, as well.
“He will let us know the moment he has her, and I will bring you to her. To them both.” Tattypoo nodded until Alice nodded, too.
“There’s nowhere in Neverland that one could be hidden that he cannot find them.
He will bring her back. I promise you this,” she said, with absolute confidence.
This was hope. Wendy—Alice’s mother!—would be found.
And as Alice imagined her dear friend running to the arms of the man Wendy had hoped would come find her, who was also Alice’s father, tears began.
She had spent a lifetime being nobody’s.
It turned out she had been somebody’s the whole while.
She had shared a locked room with her mother and never known it—had braided her hair, and had her hair braided in return, and sung the same song in the dark.
Her mother’s hands had been in her hair.
That was the thought that undid her. Not the years.
Wendy’s gentle hands. Tattypoo wrapped her arms around Alice, as she had since she was a girl, and for a moment Alice rocked in her warm embrace.
“I have many questions,” Alice said, and Tattypoo, giving her one final squeeze as she always did, stepped back.
She gestured to the chairs beside the hearth for Alice to sit.
There was a knock, and Blinkem came in with an armload of firewood that he had certainly not carried the length of the palace himself, except that he certainly had. He built up the low fire without being asked. He looked weathered or worried.
“Will you stay?” Alice asked him, her voice still low and cracked.
“I’ll be just outside,” he said. “I find I’m no good at being further away than that.” He said it plainly, the way he said everything, and then he was gone, and the door stood open behind him exactly one inch, which Alice found to be the correct amount.
Tattypoo settled into her chair and took up the thread as though it had never been dropped. “As you should! One thing I used to say to Peter when we had many questions is ‘Let us begin at the beginning and…’”
“Go on until you come to the end.” Alice’s skin tingled as she finished Tattypoo’s thought. Her dreams now echoed in absolute clarity in her waking world. A sign that she was where she was meant to be, for her dreams of Wonderland had foretold of this.
“How did you know I would say that?” Tattypoo asked her with a grin that beamed with pride.
“It was once said to me in a dream,” Alice said as the dreams of Wonderland shifted inside of her, becoming something much different, something that told her not only where she was heading, but also where she belonged.
Tattypoo nodded and said softly, “Ah yes, predictive dreaming, I suppose we can start there.” She leaned forward and touched Alice’s hand. “Shall we begin, Alice?”
Alice met Tattypoo’s gaze, the eyes that knew her, that wished to protect her.
And Tattypoo had protected her, in her own way, and for a moment, Alice stayed looking at her, before turning to the wide window of colored glass.
A final sliver of orange slipped below the tree lines, and the faint glow of the pink moon could be seen.
Wendy, Peter is coming to find you, Alice thought, and though the outcome was not certain, she held onto the hope that he would.
Alice watched as the dragon, Dinah, emerged from below the treetops to soar freely over the sprawling Palace North grounds.
Alice turned to Tattypoo and nodded for her to begin.
And there, in the Northern Quadrant of Oz, she sat before her grandmother—the Great Witch of the North—to learn the story of how it all had come to be.
And how, in many ways, for Alice, it was only just beginning.
THE END