Neverland (22 page)

“All right, goddamnit, so I threw it out.” Uncle Ralph didn’t look back from the television set in the den. “A boy his age shouldn’t be playing with dolls, and I was so dog-tired of looking at it.”

“Well, just go back and get it.” Aunt Cricket stood firm. She tapped her toe on the floor, up, down, up, down. The small den was dark and smelled of pine and mildew and Uncle Ralph’s dirty feet. The TV set was its only light. I watched from the doorway. Upstairs, Sumter was pitching a fit in his room. You could hear things hitting the floor; you could hear his fists banging against the walls.

“I told you I threw it out. It’s gone for good,” he said. In his right hand he scrunched up a Budweiser can.

“Well, you just tell me where it went.”

“Cricket, you are a piece of work, you know that? A goddamn piece of work. I pitched it. Off the bluff. It’s probably sleeping with the fishes right now.”

Grammy Weenie wheeled up alongside me and grabbed me by the wrist. “Go tell your cousin to calm himself. Tell him I will not tolerate a temper tantrum.”

I wriggled out of her grasp and hurried along the hall to the staircase. Missy sat at the bottom of the stairs and watched me step around her. I took the stairs two at a time, sliding my hand up the banister. All this over a dumb teddy bear. I was in my socks, so I slid on the landing, skidding down the hall like I was ice skating. I came to Sumter’s room and tried the door. Locked.

“It’s me.”

I heard things hitting the walls, glass breaking, feet stomping, hands slapping. Something thudded against the other side of the door—he’d thrown something at me, but the door was in the way.

“Go away, you traitor.”

“I am not a traitor, now you open this door.”

“You probably told them everything, anyway.”

“You know I didn’t.”

“Go away, you hear me?”

“Sumter, Grammy says she wants to see you.”

“She knows where she can go.”

But even as he said this, just on the other side of the door, I felt another door opening in my brain and someone was digging around with his grubby little fingers. I heard Sumter’s voice inside me say,
You hate all of them, too, don’t you. Beau? Grown-ups are bad. Lucy wants us. We can be with Lucy. We just need the right sacrifice.

In my dreams that night I was looking over the edge of the bluffs. I was wearing my underwear and I had a flashlight in my hand. I was looking for something down among the rocks and sea. It was night out, and the sea and sky had merged into one rippling purple robe, with a white stitch
down its middle where the full moon reflected off it. Down below, something was coming out of the water.

Climbing up the side of the bluff.

Before I saw what it was, I heard it growling.

It was Bernard, the teddy bear, his button eyes gleaming fiercely when I shone my flashlight down on him.

A dark streak ran down his furry muzzle.

The next morning, Sumter had his teddy bear back. It was more raggedy than before, with thistles around its ears as if it had been caught in the underbrush. Its paws were covered with mud, and it had lost its left eye. But it was still Bernard, and Sumter kept it close to him. He would not explain how he managed to retrieve the thing from where his father had tossed it. But there were other things going on at home besides a teddy bear. Something new, a silence, had crept into the house. The fights were still there, but under the surface, like smoldering embers. Our parents were always at war, with each other, with alcohol, with the humidity, and the wars all began the way wars do: with a single shot, and this filled with bourbon or gin or blackberry brandy. We children had no wars, and still we had our fort, our hideout, our way of escaping.

Why could I not resist going to that shack?

Sumter spent all his days there, alone, away from the rest of us. During the better part of the day I would feel no compulsion to go there. The daylight world attracted me, with long walks on the beach, riding to town with my father on some mindless errand, watching television while I
bounced Governor on my knee. Missy was progressing through the basics of knitting with Mama, and Nonie decided the best use of her time was to lie half naked across the gritty beach and darken. The grown-ups didn’t start drinking until three or four. Julianne did most of our cooking and read aloud from Gothic novels down on the rocks while Nonie tanned. In other words, we spent our days in a relaxed state of boredom as if we were satiated drug addicts. Grammy Weenie became ever more silent, wheeling in her chair around the halls, stroking her hair with the dreaded silver-backed brush, reading silently from her Bible, watching the road from the front window as if expecting something
most peculiar
to amble up her driveway.

But the nights were different.

As the light faded in the evening, I’d begin picking up Sumter’s radio signals in my brain. His voice, eating away at my own,
Lucy wants you. Neverland. Now. Come.
I would look across the dinner table at him through the steam of Julianne’s leek soup. He would be helping himself to more mashed potatoes. He would not even be looking at me, and still I heard him in my head.

“You children go play,” one of the grown-ups would say, “before it gets dark.”

Sumter would be out first, and Julianne, more often than not, would shoot me a look that said
beware!
, but I would successfully ignore it. The grown-ups had no warnings: They were having after-dinner drinks.

As I went out the front door one night, later than usual because I had to kiss my baby brother good night to keep him from crying, I thought I saw a ghost. She was white and pale and shiny like a grub under a rock. But it was only Aunt Cricket in a white cotton nightgown. Holding her bourbon-filled glass in the air, she said, “It’s okay, really, to have a sip or two, isn’t it, Beau? My doctor in Atlanta says that it’s good for the blood pressure,
and when you’re a grown-up, there’s a lot of that going around, you know?” She sat in the front room, on the sofa, her legs curled up under her. The room was in twilight, warm like an oven, and quiet, even with the
tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh
of the electric fans encircling her. Grammy sat across from her and me, asleep in her chair, for she often slept early.

I said, “Aunt Cricket?”

“Yes?”

“Why do grown-ups like the taste of bourbon?”

She thought for the longest minute, and I was about to take off thinking she’d forgotten the question, when she replied, “I guess it’s because we
have
to like it. When you’re all grown up, you’ll know. When you’re just a child like yourself, you do what you want, you have choices. But when you grow up, Beau, I will tell you now, it ain’t fun. I never do what I want. You know something, honey? I
never
do what I want. I’ve always done what I
have
to do. I
have
to like the taste of bourbon, and
hey
,” she said with that drunken Southern twist that’s so appealing and so disturbing, “I ain’t feeling no pain right now. Nothin’
hurts
, you know?”

“I guess,” I said.

“You boys play nice, don’tcha?”

“Yes’m.”

“Be ’specially nice to my boy. He was born on a bad day, and his daddy never plays nice with him.”

“Yes’m.”

Then she whispered something, as if I wasn’t in the room at all, and what I think she said was,
“Couldn’t even have one, but she could have two, and look what she tried to do to that sweet little innocent baby. My own sister, my own
blood.”

“Aunt Cricket?”

But she was off in some memory to which I was not privy.

So the grown-ups stayed put at night and drank and read and played the radio and fought in their minds.

But the children all went to Neverland.

The light toward the end of August was dimmer, moving closer to winter than any of us would suspect. The smell of the earth and the sea was strong in our nostrils, and we breathed the air as if we owned it. We enjoyed the diluted dark, the fireflies, the crunch of crickets beneath our bare feet. We’d troop single file, or go, shamefacedly, one at a time, thinking no one else would arrive, until we were all at the door, trying to see in around the cardboard Sumter had taped over the windows.

Neverland was our drug, our dream.

Sumter’s face was black with mud as he opened the clubhouse door. He had combed mud through his white hair, causing it to stick straight out. He was naked from the waist up, more mud and filth streaked across his small round belly, armpit to armpit. Only his swimming trunks were clean.

“You been playing pig?” Nonie asked.

“What’s the password?”

Missy shrugged and looked at me.

I said, “Ain’t no password.” I peered around him. The inside of Neverland was yellow with fluttering light.

“Yeah, huh.”

Like a pencil stuck in my ear, I heard the password in my mind and then blurted it out.

Nonie lip-farted.

“You may enter,” Sumter whispered gravely, moving to the side to let me in.

“Some password,” Nonie said, but repeated it.

“I can’t say that,” Missy shook her head, “it’s too
nasty
.”

“You don’t get in unless you say the password.”

“Well, I won’t get in, then.”

“Lucy wants you to say the password.”

“Lucy can go have a cow.”

Sumter shot his hand out at Missy so quickly it was like a bird taking off in flight, and then he slapped her so hard I could practically feel it.

“Do not take Lucy’s name in vain.”

Missy’s eyes teared up. She reached up and touched the red skin along her right cheek where he’d slapped her.

None of us took Missy’s side in this. We were already inside Neverland. We had already said the word that was both dread and wonderful.

I thought my sister would hate her twin and me for betraying her. She looked at all three of us, standing on the other side of the door. But like the rest of us, she wanted in. She knew that the only adventure she’d have for the rest of our last week on the island would be inside those old wooden walls.

“Oh, all right,” she said, frustrated. Then she repeated the password three times fast.

Inside Neverland the air was fragrant, like gardenia blossoms. Sumter held up the small atomizer that belonged to Grammy Weenie. “Isis of the Nile,” he said, spraying more of the perfume around. “I stole it from her table. One of Lucy’s commandments is ‘Thou shalt steal.’”

“Oh, wow,” Missy said, her eyes widening.

Sumter had lit the shed with candles, also stolen from the Retreat. They were arranged in a starlike pattern around the dirt. He’d been cleaning, moving the broken pots and garden tools off to the sides, bringing the large peach crate to the star’s center. The crate now rested upside down, and Sumter had carved a small hole near its base. “Our god resides within.”

Nonie cupped her hand over my ear. “You believe this?”

Sumter clapped his hands. “No secrets. Not among us. All must be revealed.”

“Is something
really
in there?” Missy asked.

“See for yourself.”

She tiptoed over the squat white candles and knelt down beside the crate. She put her ear against the wood. “I hear something.”

“Lucy.”

Missy screwed her face up. “It sounds like growling. Don’t y’all hear it?”

“Put your hand in there.” Sumter nodded to the hole at the base of the crate.

“Uh-uh.”

He went over and knelt beside her. “Watch,” he said, and thrust his hand inside the crate. “It’s a test of faith.”

“There’s nothing in there,” Nonie huffed.

“Then put your hand in.”

“Don’t—” I said, grabbing Nonie’s arm.

She shook herself out of my grasp. She practically knocked a candle over on her way to the crate—the yellow light wavered. When Nonie strutted, nothing got in her way. Missy sat back on her fanny. Nonie looked bored as she stuck her hand in the crate. Then she grinned, smug with whatever knowledge she’d just grasped.

She started giggling.

“It feels,” she said, “it feels . . . ”

“Not
it
,” Sumter corrected,
“Lucy.”

“It’s
licking
me.”

Nonie stuck her arm in farther. “You have a kitten in there?”

Missy said, almost greedily, “A kitty? Here, let me.”

Nonie had been reaching around inside the crate when she seemed to hold onto whatever she’d been grasping at. A look of puzzlement tightened her face. She drew her hand out, looking at it curiously.

Missy leaned forward, her back to the crate’s opening, thrusting her hand in. The hole in the crate was almost too small for her hand. “Kitty? Wait, it’s tiny. It’s the size of . . . all furry. Is it a hamster? Jeez!” She brought her hand out, shaking it. “That thing bit me.”

Nonie rubbed her hand. “It bit me, too, or something.” She bled slightly just around her wrist. “I didn’t feel it. It likes to bite. But it doesn’t hurt.”

“Lucy.”
Sumter beamed like a proud parent.

“What you got in there, Sumter?” I asked. I didn’t move from where I stood at the open door.

“It’s okay, c’mon. Beau, it’s okay,” Missy said, but she sounded slightly drunk. Her eyes were half shut. She wiped at her face, grinning. “Gawd, they all tickle, like little feathers. Lightning bugs.” She nodded her head up and down and back and forth as if the air were liquid and pushing against her. “Swimming,” she whispered, “swimming lightning bugs, lights, sea.”

“Lucy,” Sumter mouthed without speaking, “Lucy likes blood.”

Nonie nodded. “Lucy. Yeah.” She, too, seemed to be seeing what Missy saw. She grabbed at the air with her fingers. The yellow light painted their faces and made them seem very old and wizened, and I had a vision of my sisters as old ladies getting high on sherry and sitting on a porch, nodding at the lightning bugs on a summer evening. A ribbon of blood spun out from Nonie’s wrist and tangled in and around her fingers as she flapped her hands in the air.