Chapter 13
CHAPTER
I PULLED MY COAT tighter.
My boots struck against the pavement, but even that was unable to soften the rush of wings overhead.
Streetlamps flickered. One by one. And all along my path crows landed on lampposts near me and watched in silence.
At the river crossing, the wind had died, and the city stood motionless.
Water lapped at the bridge pilings, slow and uneven. It even seemed like the Thames was trying to remain still. All of us on guard for shadows.
The loudest sound came from the pocket watch ticking inside my satchel. Roger always near, always reminding me to keep time, to keep moving. To keep watch.
I kept moving.
I’d already let Liza know not to worry, that I’d be home late. She seemed pleased by this, thinking that maybe I’d be out with girlfriends. Or maybe I’d be meeting with a man. Can’t imagine she’d expect my delay due to being interrogated by Scotland Yard for suspicion of kidnapping.
My eyes adjusted to the dark that engulfed the end of the street. My stomach fluttered when I saw them.
Two figures. Standing in the street just outside my home. Each looking up at the windows.
I slowed. My throat tightened. They seemed so absolutely unreal. There. Them. Together.
My brothers.
Were they ghosts? Was this Peter playing tricks?
Or had they really come home after all these years?
John and Michael.
John stood tall, rigid, hands clasped behind his back. Sharp. All angles. Handsome in a dark suit, which caught the lamplight. He looked older than I remembered. Gray threading throughout his temples. Lines bracketing his mouth. Just like Father.
Beside him, Michael. My baby brother, though he wasn’t a baby anymore. A grown man, broad through the shoulders. Jaw squared and stubbled. Posture carrying that particular alertness I’d seen in the soldiers at the hospital. He was eighteen now. His hair was fairer, like Mother’s.
They both looked up as I approached. And in that instant, the tension in my shoulders eased, and I felt like I could breathe.
John’s posture softened. Michael’s face brightened with relief.
“Wendy,” John said. My name suspended between reprimand and gladness. “You’ve kept us waiting.”
Michael, my baby brother, charged straight at me, scooped me off my feet, and spun me in the air in the middle of the street.
“Wendy!” he shouted. “I’ve missed you!”
“Michael, please don’t drop her,” John teased.
“Be quiet, you boring, ol’ barrister. I could’ve done that too, you know, become a barrister, but I’m going to go see the world. Make things with my hands.”
Mrs. Crane’s blinds snapped open across the way.
“Oh, dear,” John said. “We have company.”
Michael stopped and set me down. I leaned on his shoulder. “That’s great. I love company,” he said.
Michael raised a hand in greeting and boomed, “Good evening, Mrs. Crane! Lovely to see you! You haven’t aged a bit!”
He waved with boyish enthusiasm, and she let out a scandalized gasp before yanking the blinds shut.
“Michael!” I elbowed hm.
“What?”
And once again he scooped me up and spun me in the air.
Behind us, John approached. Measured. Composed. His boots clicked once on the stone before he stopped.
“All right. All right. Put her down.”
“John!” I leaped up and threw my arms around his neck. “I’m so glad you are here. Why’d you take so long?”
“I’m sorry … I’m just so sorry, Wendy.”
Michael embraced us both, squeezing tight. And for just the flash of a moment, we were children again kicking a ball in the street. Chasing Nana in the garden.
The three of us stood bound together. A small circle of warmth in a city that felt colder than it should.
A small family, but still, this was my family.
Later we would talk about all things serious.
But right now, we laughed. We reveled in our freedom.
Michael complimented my hair, how it’d grown past my waist. And he and I teased John, so serious and so stiff but so clever.
We huddled, recognizing between pauses how we’d survived something no one would ever understand but each other.
Here we were now, John, a barrister. Michael, who’d completed his studies at King’s College.
How brilliant they both were. And the silent understanding that something had prevented us from having these lives and was trying to do it again.
Soon, the laughter faded and none of us spoke.
Silence stretched and filled with everything we hadn’t said.
Every Christmas I’d spent alone.
Every letter I’d written and they hadn’t answered.
Every time I’d seen John’s name in the papers, successful barrister, respectable marriage, and I wondered if he ever thought of me.
“I’m sorry,” John repeated. His voice wavered. “For staying away. For letting you carry this alone.”
Michael’s jaw tightened. “We thought if we discussed it like Father said … Pretend we were normal.” He turned his face to the night sky and shouted. “Ha! Normal! Stupid!”
“We were scared,” I said. “All of us.”
John nodded. His hand found mine.
“Not anymore,” he said. “Whatever happens next, we do it together. The three of us. Like it should have been from the start.”
Michael placed his hand over ours. His palm was rough now, calloused. A man who went from university to bricklayer and soon to be off to war.
“Together,” he said.
The word hung in the cold air like a vow.
The three of us laughed again, quieter this time, but real. Loud enough that the whole of the street seemed to flare awake.
Dogs barked. Front lights snapped on. Curtains twitched.
Faces appeared in windows, whispering behind glass about those troublesome, noisome Darling children gathered in the street at this hour.
Of course it was those three. That raucous trio whose wild stories once filled newspapers and books and stages.
Their names which still crossed the lips of London women over their tea.
Let them talk. Let them whisper.
I no longer cared what any of those useless people said, because now I had my brothers, and I had my purpose, and it was greater than all those who spoke about us.
Because while we were the ones they vilified and mocked, what they didn’t know, what they could never know, was that the work my brothers and I had ahead of us was greater than all of them. Greater than any story any of them could ever tell.
Their children, and their children’s children, would be able to sleep safely in their beds forever because on this cold night, on this London street, the Darlings had come together again to vanquish Peter Pan.
At the top of the stairs, John spoke. “We heard about the boy.”
Michael swallowed. “Willie,” he said quietly. “Beatrice’s letters reached us this morning. We came straightaway.”
Beatrice’s letters? That sneaky and loving Beatrice.
“Beatrice’s letters reached you? But I sent you letters, and you …” My voice thinned. “Did you not receive any of them?”
They exchanged a glance, brows tightening.
“You called me the other night, but the line disconnected, and when I tried to ring you back there was no answer,” Michael said.
“No,” I said, perplexed.
He stared. “You didn’t?”
“No, not at night. In the morning, before school.”
John exhaled. “Peter. He’s crossed our lines and tampered with our mail.”
A cold certainty slid down my spine.
“Of course he did,” I whispered. He’s a devil, and he knows we’re stronger together.”
We stepped inside.
The three of us stood in the parlor, the fire burning low, the silence stretching between us.
I made tea. The ritual of it seemed to steady us. Kettle. Cups. Saucers. Sugar bowl.
We had been children the last time we sat together like this.
John held his cup but didn’t drink. His eyes moved around the room, cataloguing, assessing.
The barrister’s habit. I wondered what he saw.
Worn furniture. Books stacked on every surface.
Window latched and reinforced with extra locks.
Did he hear the dripping faucet in the kitchen that kept me company on the nights when the silence seemed so loud?
This was what my life had become. A teacher’s wages. A leaking house. And locks on every window.
Michael sat on the edge of the settee, elbows on his knees, hands clasped.
He looked too large for the space. Too alive.
In a few weeks he would ship out to Belgium, and all the horrors the newspapers dressed up in words like honor and duty.
I wanted to remember his face like this, the way his jaw had squared, the stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave, the lines around his eyes.
I didn’t want to tell him about the hospital and all of the soldiers there and how their eyes had dimmed.
“You both look exhausted,” I said. A stupid thing to say. We were all exhausted. We had been exhausted for twelve years.
“Thought I was going mad.” Michael admitted. “Or maybe I’d always been mad and just gotten better at hiding it.”
“You’re not mad,” I said.
“Neither are you.” He looked up at me. “I should have said that years ago.”
“You were just a baby …”
John set down his cup. The clink of porcelain against porcelain was too loud. “I should have said it.”
I wanted to say that it was fine. That I understood. We were all children and scared and pressured by adults with what to say. But all of those years had calcified into something harder than understanding.
I’d grown used to being by myself. No one to write.
No one to visit. Books kept me company at night, stories I could control, with endings that were written, solid, and could not be contradicted by someone else.
I’d long ago resigned myself to the fact that people feared me for what I had experienced, as if getting close to me would transfer that suffering onto them. As if madness were contagious.
The fire popped. Shadows jumped. All three of us flinched.
Michael laughed, a short, harsh sound. “Look at us. Grown adults, scared of the dark.”
“Because we know what’s in the dark,” I said.
The silence returned, but it was different now.