Neverland (19 page)

I was about to withdraw my head, to go no farther, both because I was scared and because I heard my mother calling to me from beyond the woods, but first I said into the dark, “If there’s really a Lucy . . . ”

I heard a voice, not in my head, and not behind me in the world of daylight, but up ahead in the dark.

“Beau,”
it whispered, “
can you let me out to play
?”

I jammed my head back against the opening, but it seemed to have shrunk, and I couldn’t pull myself back. I was staring at darkness. I began pushing my hands against the small frame of the opening, slapping at it. I dug my toes into the ground for leverage and twisted around, trying to get my head out sideways. It hurt to breathe. I closed my eyes, even to the darkness, because I was afraid I would
begin
to see whatever was whispering to me.

“
Play
,” the voice whispered. It was coming closer. Whatever it was, it was moving closer. I could
smell
its breath, and it was sweet like rotting gardenias. It was so sweet it
hurt
to inhale it. I felt like I was choking. My eyes were tearing up.

Finally I tucked my chin down and managed to scrape the rest of my head out, leaving behind a thin layer of skin from my earlobe and the side of my cheek. Daylight slapped me, and I fell backward into the blackberry bushes.

I’m not sure what I was thinking that afternoon, but I ended up down by the sea, cutting the bottoms of my feet on the rough edges of rocks. My arms and legs were scratched from prickers. Welts covered my neck and arms from yellow jacket bites. I didn’t set foot in that water, but stood right where the waves licked at my toes.

The voice from Neverland I’d heard was the woman’s from my nightmare, the woman who had told me “
The bunny screams because it is alive
.”

As I stood there, shivering not from cold but from fear, how was I to know that I was making a choice? When you stand at the border of the land and the sea, it is clear where one leaves off and the other begins. But where lies the boundary between the perceived world and the imagined?

I stood there not knowing that I was making that choice, that I was crossing that border then, that the forbidden would call me, that I had not run from Neverland because the voice from the dark scared me, but because it
attracted
me, and I was fighting that attraction. Fighting it with all my strength.

But even children have their breaking points.

I worked myself into a fever by the time the supper bell rang.

“You were playing in the woods again,” Mama said, feeling my forehead as I leaned against the kitchen counter. The room was spinning, and I clutched her arm. She turned to give commands, “Missy, hon, run upstairs and get the orange shoe box off the top shelf of the linen closet. You don’t have to bring the whole thing down, just look through it for the thermometer in the little plastic tube. Nonie, you open up a can of Campbell’s and see if we don’t have some saltines around and make up a little tray.”

“I’m okay,” I said, but I was close to fainting.

“It’s probably nothing more than too much excitement and too much sun,” Mama said, “but if you’re coming down with something, I want you in bed now. If your temperature’s low enough, we’ll see. Missy!” she yelled through the kitchen doorway. “Better bring the whole kit down!
Beau,
where did
these
come from?” She had finally seen the bites and scratches along my arms. She rolled my short sleeves up farther to find even more.

“Yellow jackets.”

“Well, no
wonder
you’re ill.” Mama held my arm up in the kitchen light. “Well, they don’t look too bad, but we better wash all these out with peroxide.”

I was in bed shivering with the covers up around my ears. My temperature had only been slightly higher than normal, and the whole time Mama had the thermometer in my mouth she was asking me questions that I couldn’t answer—she’d had a martini or two and was becoming talkative.

“What exactly went on out in the woods today? Between Daddy and Sumter and you? You know you had Daddy very upset; he went looking for you and couldn’t find you. You and the girls have been looking tired, and Grammy said you’ve been sneaking out of the house at all hours. Now, you and I have no secrets from each other, so you can tell me: What are you children up to? Are you just out playing? Are they good games? You and Sumter, you’re getting along all right, are you?”

I nodded, I shook my head, and when the thermometer came out of my mouth I said, “I just went looking for berries and fell in some prickers is all.” I looked down on the floor where Governor sat mostly naked except for his diapers, which were half off, anyway. If I avoided looking at my mother, she might miss out on the fact that I was lying. I always felt like she could see right through me. I think she really could.

She eyed me almost suspiciously. “Blackberries’d be all dried up by now.”

“I saw some in the woods that weren’t. Then I went down to the beach.”

“You didn’t go swimming by yourself.”

“Uh-uh. I just was tired. I thought I’d soak the bites in saltwater.” There,
that
was a good lie.

“Y’all play in the old gardener’s shed, don’t you?” Mama didn’t seem suspicious.

“Sometimes, but we can’t get in. It’s all locked up.”

“When I was a girl it was full of wonderfully old-fashioned things.” She wiped a warm washcloth across my forehead. “Grampa Lee stored things there. Your great-grampa did, too. So there were, oh, coffee grinders and ancient sewing machines and Grammy’s dolls used to be out there—not in their case at all, but just piled up. It was wonderful playing out there, although Grammy never liked us being there.”

My mother’s tone changed when she spoke about her mother. It was as if she began to remember something unpleasant and unkind—perhaps even cruel—about Grammy Weenie, but tried to disguise it by speaking softly, like a child herself, chastened. “She would tell us terrible tales about rats and spiders and broken glass. Cricket and I just stopped going through all that junk. And Babygirl, too, we all called her that—she was older than me, and she was still the baby. You never met your other aunt, you were about a year old when she passed on. The shed used to be
her
place. She was . . . well, childlike, even later. Even when she was older.”

“Babygirl never grew up?”

“That’s one way of putting it. But she was kind of sick all her life, Beau. They took her to doctor after doctor, clinic after clinic.”

“She have bad circulation like me?”

“No. Your grammy always said she had a clouded mind, and she had dark days as well as some light ones. We loved her, we really did, she was our
sister
.” My mother shook off this thought. “But we had fun in that shed! Games and hide-and-seek. Sometime after she died, Grampa Lee emptied it out. Mama—
Grammy—
sometimes gets things in her head. . . .” My mother combed her fingers across the top of my scalp absently. “She’d forbid us from doing the most innocent things.”

“Grammy says she had red hair.”

“Who?”

“Babygirl.”

“She said that? Well, I told you she gets confused. She had blond-white hair. It was beautiful. Now
Grammy
used to have red hair before it turned gray. Maybe that’s what she meant. But Babygirl had shiny blond hair. Grampa Lee had white hair like that.”

“Sumter, he has hair like that,” I said.

“Yes, he does. Funny how we get things from people.” Mama brought her hands up to her face, pressing the palms into her forehead and wiping down the length of her face as if it were dirty. “Your grammy’s always going on about who we look like, what’s been passed down, and of course she can’t
stand
the fact that your daddy’s mother was
Irish.
When you get to a certain age. . . . Well, I suppose she clings to the past too much.”

“I like hearing her memorials.”

“Memoirs.
You may be the only one who does. You feeling okay, hon?”

“Almost.”

“You want some more soup?”

I slept for a while, occasionally awaking to the sound of the TV downstairs or chairs being pulled in and pushed out at the dining room table or footsteps in the hall outside my door. Next thing I knew, my door was creaking open and there was Sumter with a big blue towel wrapped around his waist.

“Hey,” I said.

“How you?”

“Just fine, or getting there.”

“Lucy says you went out to Neverland.”

“Didn’t go in.”

“Okay if you did. Does Lucy talk to you ever?”

I hesitated. “No.”

“You’re a family of liars, but that’s okay.”

“You gonna take a bath?”

He nodded, holding up his box of
Mr. Bubble
. “My mama says I need a boiling bath to clean me off. I hate it when she turns the water on so hot. You’re lying about Lucy, ain’t ya?”

“Okay, Lucy did talk to me. I think. Maybe I imagined it.”

“No such thing as
imagine
. If you think something happened, it did. Did you
see
anything? I mean, when it talks to you.”

I shook my head.

This seemed to satisfy him.

“What is Lucy anyway?”

“Just a god. One among many.”

Then it hit me—the reason I’d run down to the sea, the reason why the voice from the shed had chilled me. I’d had a thought buzzing through my head, and now I knew what it was exactly.
We were probably worshipping the Devil. I
didn’t believe in the Devil, but maybe there was one after all. Boldly, I asked, “Is it like Lucy
-fer
?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” With that, he turned and left the room.

A few minutes later I heard the water splashing in the bathroom next to my room. Aunt Cricket was saying, “It is not so hot. Now you get in there, the steam’ll clean off all that dirt and you’ll feel better. You will not boil up to nothing, Sunny, now just get in.” The droning sound the water made, as Aunt Cricket filled up the tub, helped me to fall back asleep.

The bunny screams, the woman was saying to me. She had white hair like Sumter’s. She was shorter than any grown-up woman I’d ever seen, just slightly taller than one of the munchkins from
The Wizard of Oz.
Her face was broad and ugly, her forehead high and huge, her eyes pale blue and pretty, like glittering translucent marbles thrust into a potato. We waded through the water along the shore of the island in the middle of Rabbit Lake.

Her legs were white and shiny with water, and her hair was white and shiny, too. She was naked like one of the
Playboy
girls, but not as chesty and not as cuddly looking, and certainly with nothing about her that even approached beauty. It didn’t bother me that she had no clothes on; what bothered me was she was holding my hand too tight and it hurt. Also, I was wondering what I was going to step on in the water: Fat albino pollywogs swarmed around our ankles by the dozens.

“Of course there is, everybody knows there’s a
Heaven.”
I tugged free of her grip and almost fell backward in among the pollywogs.

“Are you the
Devil
?”