Wendy knew it wouldn’t be long now before her daughter was taken. She had put the idea from her mind as long as she could, but now Jane was days away from turning thirteen.

From the window of the nursery, Wendy saw Jane wobbling her way down Kensington Park Road on a borrowed bicycle, hair unbraided and wild like she’d been flying. Wendy’s throat seized with fear. Was that gold glittering in the girl’s hair? Had the neighbors seen? Was that his laughter that rang out from Kensington Park across the way? Wendy ran into the street and hauled Jane off the contraption and into the house.

The row they got into after was one of the worst ones yet, leaving Wendy’s heart a limp and ragged thing by the end of it.

Wendy had never wanted to move back into 14 Kensington Park Road, with its drafty windows, dilapidated frontage, and earthy reek of fairies, and she’d certainly never wanted to raise Jane there. But her family’s flat had been damaged in the first Zeppelin raid of the War, and her parents had insisted she take over the London house, themselves having retired to the country. Her brother John had fled to the Americas long before the War and her youngest brother Michael was later lost to it. Now, after a decade, with her siblings gone, the economy sunk, and her husband having twice been passed over for promotions, it seemed like the house would remain Wendy’s responsibility, whether she wished it or not. But it was a roof and a hearth and so she had convinced herself that the smell of pixies was simply her imagination.

Her husband had approached the ownership of No. 14 with his usual unbridled enthusiasm. He had long ago promised they’d restore the moldering wallpaper; re-tile the fireplace where she’d once split her lip; and do something about the cellar where she and her brothers had played hide-and-seek, which now nursed two inches of water after a rain. But her husband rarely had a true sense of their accounts and Wendy had known his aspirations for upkeep had the solidity of soap bubbles. So she had long ago taken it upon herself to whitewash the walls, put a cheap, but colorful, wool rug over the broken hearth, and lock the cellar door.

Times had not gotten better. Jane’s birthday was celebrated without fanfare: a small cake, new galoshes, and definitely no bicycle.

“She will come around,” her husband said, putting a hand over Wendy’s after Jane stormed out. But he was not the seawall that took the pounding of their daughter’s rage. In its wake, Wendy could almost see her own father sitting in the seat Jane had just vacated, going over the accounts her mother had meticulously kept, wheedling over each penny spent on the children. Each small gift commensurate with a cost.

“Just because you are too hen-hearted to go anywhere, does not mean I am,” Jane had said coldly, before scraping her uneaten birthday cake into the waste bin.

So it came as little surprise that a mere week after Jane’s modest disaster of a birthday, she vanished. The only traces that remained were a cold breath of air from the flung-open window and the unmistakable grave-rot of fairies. The milk of the full moon turned the nursery into a ghost of itself, shimmering with the shadows of all the children who’d flown from it since the last time that window had been opened, Wendy included.

She gripped the windowsill, goose bumps on her bare arms, a mixture of relief and bitterness warring within her. She had guarded against this moment, but still it had come. She resisted the fantasy of doing nothing, of letting Jane fly off into her own mistakes. Or doing something rash, like burning the whole house to the ground.

Instead, Wendy gave herself one, no, two long moments, to hate Peter Pan.

Then she got to work.

**

Wendy had never told Jane about Peter, and with good reason. She didn’t trust her daughter not to romanticize him the way she once had. At bedtime in that old house, the veil between here and Neverland felt dangerously thin, as if she could turn her head just so and see its beaches and crystal waters out of the corner of her eye.

But Jane’s demand for new and fantastical stories every night had to be met, if Wendy was to have any peace. So she read her the likes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For Jane, the darker the tale, the better.

“Alice is so foolish,” Jane said, haughtily. “I would never have let the Queen speak to me like that.”

“But she was the Queen. Alice was in her kingdom,” Wendy said, helpless before her daughter’s imagination.

“And if I were Queen, I wouldn’t just sit around and play croquet and yell at people. I would go off and have adventures. I might still behead people, though,” Jane said thoughtfully.

“Well, it’s all just a fantasy,” Wendy said, closing the book with a snap.

“Maybe.” Jane pulled up the covers. “Didn’t you have adventures as a child, Mum?”

Wendy froze. Was that a hovering face in the nursery window? No, just her own reflection.

“Certainly not,” Wendy said. “Ordinary girls don’t go on outlandish adventures.”

“How dull,” Jane sighed, her young eyes full of pity.

**

“Did it all really happen?” Michael asked Wendy, just days after she moved back to No. 14. Michael was home on holiday, his schoolbooks spilled unceremoniously across the rug where Wendy cradled a tiny Jane in her arms.

“Did what happen?” she asked, stroking Jane’s hair. The baby was almost asleep in the drowsy afternoon light. She hoped her brother wasn’t asking about the Zeppelin raid. She was still convinced the scent of sulphur and smoke clung to her, though she had washed several times since the bombs fell.

“Neverland,” Michael whispered, “the pirates, Peter, the flying, all that?”

Yes! she wanted to shout, because they hadn’t spoken of it since they were young children, since she’d finally stopped waiting for Peter to come for her. But the baby brother who she’d help raise, who’d flown to Neverland, wasn’t the person sitting before her. This Michael was a young man, tall and broad-chested, trying desperately to grow a mustache. Hadn’t she only just carried him to bed from where he’d fallen asleep in front of the wireless, clutching his bear?

She looked down at Jane. Back inside these walls, Neverland seemed impossibly present, dancing just behind her daughter’s eyelids. She didn’t want her daughter waiting and waiting, as she once had, as Michael apparently still did, for a dream that would never be realized. For a dream that, now viewed through a lens of adulthood, was tinged with nightmare. The world was enough a nightmare as it was.

“Those were wonderful stories, weren’t they Michael?” she said, and instantly regretted it. The look in his eyes was one of betrayal, of loss. Like something in him had died.

A month later, he packed a rucksack, slipped a note through the mail slot, and joined Kitchener’s Army, to enter what was becoming The Great War. “I may not remember how to fly,” he’d written, “but I remember how to fight.”

*

Good sturdy shoes. The bag she’d kept stocked since they’d moved back into this house, containing: a torch, with a set of fresh batteries; needle and thread; bandages; a sharpened kitchen knife wrapped in a dishtowel; a handful of iron nails. She added several fresh packages of biscuits and chocolate, and a light sweater for herself and her daughter. Wendy remembered the chill nights, piled together with the Lost Boys like piglets for warmth. She shuddered.

And finally, she went down and unlocked the cellar. Descending by candlelight, the support beams and dampness put her in mind of the belly of a galleon or a secret cave dripping with bats. Just the kind of dark place fairies liked to lurk, though none were left here now, as far as she could tell. But she knew they’d been here; they’d marked their territory long ago with that dank, fungal smell. And there it was, in the mortar between the bricks: the glimmer of their dust.

Wendy took out her kitchen knife and chipped flakes of gold fairy dust into an open pouch. When she’d extracted what she could, she sprinkled herself with several large pinches of the stuff. It made her sneeze, the grave-earth smell of it. She wondered if fairy dust went stale, if she’d still remember how to find her way.

Her husband had found her escape bag once. He’d thought she’d intended to leave him, and he’d looked so crestfallen, she had felt compelled to tell him the truth. It was difficult to tell him about Peter, especially since her youngest brother, Michael, had believed in Peter the longest and Michael had been gone for years by then. To conjure up Peter was to conjure up Michael and she could hardly bear to do it. But both boys alighted in her mind as she told her husband about Neverland.

When she finished describing Peter and his home, her capture and escape, her face was wet. She didn’t know who the tears were for. For Peter or Michael? For herself? Either way, for something lost. Wendy saw a strange sort of knowing on her husband’s face—he believed her or believed that she believed. After so many years, the story had taken on a kind of timeless madness and she could understand his pity, even as she resented it. But he was softhearted, and so they had forgiven each other. But she’d been sure to hide her preparations after that.

Wendy re-locked the cellar door, just in case.

She checked in on her husband now, his face rumpled with sleep. She hoped he’d forgive her for leaving without him. Of course, he would. She was saving their child, their family, as she always did. She was setting their little world to rights so he could go on sleeping, his face and dreams as innocent as a boy’s.

What was more questionable was if he could manage in her absence. He could barely boil an egg and their accounts would, undoubtedly, be overdue upon her return. At least he would have their cook about to make sure he stayed fed, but she was sure he’d go to work, unthinkingly, in unpressed shirts and scuffed shoes. How the secretaries would talk.

No, she couldn’t think like that, not now. She hefted her pack over one shoulder and decided to instead think hard of the seaside. Of sticky toffee pudding. Of her daughter, in a good mood and laughing, amidst glowing red balloons on a previous, easier birthday. Of how her husband had looked at her when she told him she was pregnant. The sweetest thoughts she could summon.

She opened her eyes to find herself bobbing near the ceiling, the feeling of flying both effortless and familiar. Seizing bookshelves and furniture, Wendy pulled her way back to the nursery’s open window. The edge of the world was just starting to brighten with a hemline of pink. She didn’t have much time before her access to the island would begin to unravel.

“Wendy?” It was her husband, rubbing his eyes before they widened at the sight of her hovering in the window, bag slung over one shoulder, moonlight making her a shadow poised to leap.

“I am going to get Jane,” she said, with as much certainty as she could muster. She waited for him to try to stop her, level guilt at her like a rifle as her father would have done. Instead, he stood, helpless and pale in the moonlight. Her buoyancy faltered. She sighed and swam through the air until she was close enough to kiss him delicately on the head, where his hair was thinning.

“There is little time to explain,” she said, as he looked up at her. Wendy was sinking slowly back to the floor. “But I won’t let Peter keep her. Leave the casement open. We will be back soon.”

He saw her struggling in the air and grabbed her hand. But he didn’t pull her down. Instead, he kissed her palm. She rose, her hand pulling away from him.

“Take care,” he said, watching her regain her position in the window. “And come back.”

Wendy knew her husband loved her. But from her view against the ceiling, he merely looked lost. She tamped down the frustration. Love and need were so tangled for her. That was Peter’s doing.

“Of course I will,” she said. She sent up a quick, silent prayer for her husband’s continued patience, as well as for her own. “Don’t forget, the window must stay open. Oh, and do see the shoeshine boy on your way into the office, won’t you?”

She turned toward the second star, twinkling ahead of her. Straight on ’til morning, she thought. With big spoonfuls of sweet, toffee pudding.

And without looking back, she pushed off.

⁂

Neverland, for those who have never been, is an odd sort of place. It is an island and also the warm beating heart of a boy, with all the things a boy could dream: jungles and white sand beaches and dangerous riptides, caves and tunnels and secret passageways. Perfect weather and perfect storms. Magic, danger, adventure.

And when Wendy arrived as a young girl, gilded in pixie dust and flying for the first time, she was shot.

Oh, the children Peter collected, the Lost Boys, had blamed the fairies and their trickery. The fairies blamed the boys with their bows and arrows. Either way, it was Wendy who suffered. She hadn’t felt the arrow so much as the fall, the wind rushing up to greet her, stomach lurching with the plummet. She hadn’t had enough breath to scream or pray, only to watch the clouds rise up and up, the stars fading into the blue, waiting for death’s hands to catch her.

But the magic of the island caught her instead, snapping her nightgown taut like a kite. She glided to the forest floor on wings of ragged linen, where Peter’s gaggle of dirty boys crowded her. They realized then that she was not a bird, as they’d suspected, but must certainly have been a gift from Peter: a lady to care for them, make them whole.

The missile had not quite pierced Wendy’s heart, and by the time Peter arrived, the arrow had dissolved into pixie dust and cloud, leaving her merely breathless and bruised. To have avoided death and still be wanted so desperately by these lost children had indeed felt like a kind of gift. They built a house for her from branches and named her “Mother” and she had called it love before she’d known any different.

**

The trouble began with Michael’s toy sword.

Jane, age seven, emerged from the attic covered in dust, the weapon wielded in one hand with a tarnished silver serving tray in the other, and tore through the house with a blood-curdling war cry. It took Wendy nearly a quarter of an hour to talk their typically unflappable cook out of the pantry, so convinced was she that the house was being attacked by Cossacks.

“Jane, this is not acceptable,” Wendy said, sitting her daughter down. “You scared Cook half to death. That sword is not an appropriate toy.”

“You said it belonged to Uncle Michael,” Jane insisted. “He played with it, why can’t I?”

“Your uncle is a soldier,” Wendy said, the unspoken past tense tight in her throat. Michael had played with that sword, screamed at the top of his lungs while lunging at the coat rack in the front hall. No one had taken the sword away then. Nor when he used that same sword in Neverland to slaughter a pirate, before he understood what death really meant. In the protective bubble of Peter’s story, toy swords could be real weapons and good boys always won the battle. But reality proved different.

Wendy keenly felt the double-edge of it, what boys were allowed and girls were not, and the true price of violence. Michael had been told the proper thing was to take up a rifle and run screaming at the enemy. And he had never returned.

“I want to be a soldier too,” Jane declared, stabbing the point of the sword into the floorboards.

“Only men are soldiers,” Wendy said. Jane’s eyes went wide.

“What, no girls ever?” she protested.

“It is far too dangerous,” Wendy said, shaking her head. “It’s not allowed.”

“That isn’t fair!” Jane said, stomping her foot. “I want to fight like Uncle Michael.”

“Uncle Michael is gone,” Wendy snapped. “War is a great big monster and it swallowed him up. Do you want to be swallowed up too?”

Jane went silent and pale, the terror in her eyes so palpable Wendy wanted to pluck it from the air and cast it away.

“It’s just a game,” Jane said, her eyes tearing up. “The children at school, they are always playing at battles in the yard.”

“Jane,” Wendy said, softly. “There are some things too real, too close to play at, even as make-believe. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Jane, shoulders hunched. She turned and walked woodenly to the stairs. But then she’d paused and turned back, her small, fine face hard with determination.

“Next time, I shall find a better weapon,” Jane said, one hand on the banister. “To fight the monster. So you will not have to be sad about Uncle Michael any longer.”

*

The morning was raw and the stars were sharp in the inky sky. It was hard going, flying toward Neverland as an adult. Children were smaller and lighter, whereas it took all of Wendy’s concentration to stay above the rooflines. Her sturdy shoes nearly took out a weather vane. It seemed almost impossible that she should slip between the stars and sky to Neverland, as weighed down as she felt, so old and full of feelings more complicated than joy or sorrow. Joy was a weightlessness, a forgetting. Peter was always forgetting. Wendy remembered everything.

So instead, she thought about her daughter, back when things were simpler. That first golden lock of hair falling across her tiny face. How, before her daughter’s birth, it had seemed impossible that there could be room in Wendy’s heart for another soul and then, suddenly, with a cry, a crow, there was a baby, her baby, and Wendy had pushed away the terror and discovered a new door inside herself, leading to a bright, freshly aired room she’d never seen before: Jane’s room.

She’d only ever been a mother to Lost Boys, before Jane had come along, when she had been little more than a lost girl herself. But when her daughter opened her navy-blue eyes, Wendy felt as if she was being truly seen for the first time, all at once. She felt found.

A change in the light let Wendy know she’d crossed over or through or under and now was in the clear skies above Neverland. Her eyes stung with tears and wind as she slowly sank towards the white sand beaches. She tried to catch an updraft, but seeing this land again, after so much time, was too heavy to keep her aloft.

She bumped down on the shore, the warm waters washing up and over her shoes, soaking her stockings. She took them both off, tying her laces together and hanging the shoes around her neck. She’d meet Peter like she’d found him: barefooted.

But she couldn’t find a way to his hideout, if it was even still where he hid. She walked for what felt like hours, the wet sand molding to the arches of her feet. The beaches here were lined with impenetrable cliffs draped in lush, emerald greenery, glittering with the occasional waterfall. The air was rich with salt and the sun-baked smell of endless summer.

Wendy’s throat ached. She finally leaned over one of the pristine pools to quench her thirst.

“Ah, Wendybird, didn’t know if I’d see the day,” said a voice, warm and gritty. A voice from her grimmest dreams.

Captain James Hook lounged on the beach, his back against a rock, his dark curls limp on either side of his face. He looked no older than he had when he’d held her captive so many years ago, bait for both Peter Pan and the crocodiles alike. His legs stretched out before him on the beach, his one good hand propping up his other arm, which had a glowing cigar speared on the end of his loathsome hook.

But while he hadn’t aged, Hook himself was not the same. His left leg now ended just before the knee, the pant leg knotted beneath it. And instead of his long, blood-colored coat and gaudy ruffled shirts, which would not have scared her now, surely, he was dressed in the grey wool uniform of a German army officer with the spiked helmet and gold-braided epaulettes. She was put in mind of a poster she had seen in Piccadilly Square: a grotesque drawing of the Kaiser, gnawing on a British soldier’s helmet with a glint in his eye.

“Captain,” she said, keeping any form of quaver out of her voice. “I thought you’d been eaten by a crocodile.”

“Not all of me, not yet,” Hook said, a grin flashing from beneath his mustache. He slapped his good hand against his bad leg. “And it’s General now. Can’t be any kind of captain without a ship, and Pan, of course, has scuttled it.” He gestured down the beach where his ship, The Jolly Roger, listed and loomed, its prow dug into the white sand.

“And your crew?” Wendy asked, far more calmly than she felt. He would not be able to chase her at least, but she was waiting for pirates to swarm her from the cliffs or emerge as seaweed-shrouded corpses from the waves. She slipped her hand into her bag and wrapped her fingers around the handle of her kitchen knife. These pirates had taken pleasure in scaring children, in hunting them down, just because they could. But she wasn’t thirteen anymore.

“Ah, my men, all lost to the waves or the perils of growing ordinary,” Hook mused. He looked her over, bare feet to tousled hair. “Thought the waves had taken you as well, but looks like you’ve gone and grown up. That sort of thing should keep you from coming back here. Have you gone and become ordinary too, Miss Darling?”

Ordinary, like it was a curse. Ordinary, like it wasn’t something she’d worked her whole life to achieve. She put on frocks of ordinary, but they could never quite cover the parts of her that burned with the memories of Neverland.

“It’s Mrs. Davies now,” Wendy said, her own voice an echo of her daughter’s imperiousness. “I thought this place never changed. And I wanted to.”

Hook let out a hah, his dark curls blowing across his face. “Peter may not change, but his country does. Tiger Lily and her tribe left long ago, as soon as Pan forgot about them. They knew to get out, when they could. Unlike the mermaids who still cling to a manic hope, and the fairies that have infested the Roger, randy little creatures. You’d think they’d invented lust, the way they go at it.” He arched an eyebrow at Wendy, but she refused to be baited, even as she felt a hot flush climb her neck.

“Well, you too seem to have been forgotten,” she countered.

“Peter has not forgotten me,” Hook said, darkly. “But a dashing pirate no longer served his games, and so I am a German General until he needs another enemy. Meanwhile,” he said, cocking his hook out to sea, spilling ash on his uniform, “I play my own game, you see, with the mermaids.” Wendy recognized it then, the large outcropping in the water. Marooner’s Rock, where she and Peter had nearly drowned. Mermaid’s Lagoon.

“We watch one another all day, the merfolk and I, waiting for high tide,” Hook continued. “To see if this will be the day it’s high enough for them to reach me with their razor teeth. Falling out of Pan’s favor has left them quite mad. And hungry.

“You look hungry too, Mrs. Davies. It’s a look that tells me you’re after someone.” Hook looked pleased, taking a puff on his cigar. “Someone who stopped caring about you long ago.”

“I’m not here for Peter,” Wendy said hoarsely. “Peter took my daughter. I’m here for her.”

Hook’s laugh was like a gunshot. Sparkling fish scattered in the tide pools around them. Hook’s cackle quickly turned into a hacking cough through the cloud of blue cigar smoke. It smelled like burning leaves and, yes, fairies.

“Oh, Wendybird,” he said, gasping, his hand splayed across the gold buttons of his uniform, his eyes glittering, “you’ve finally come back to see what a little shit Pan is.”

⁂

Wendy had just finished telling the Lost Boys their bedtime story: her own imaginings of her happy return home. She could see her brothers forgetting and so she told the story night after night, of the flight home and the glad reunion. It became a kind of spell that she hoped would be cast in its repetition. That maybe having lost their children for a while, her parents would be more thankful for them and the obedient daughter she always tried to be.

But that night, Peter listened in. He groaned and rolled his eyes and made a mockery of her. He proceeded to tell his own story: of the mother he once had who had barred the window and put another little boy in his bed. The Lost Boys all agreed that mothers must be terrible creatures—“you excepting, of course, Wendy”—and even Wendy’s brothers vigorously agreed.

“You must let us go home at once,” Wendy said, feeling her grip on her brothers and reality slipping.

“Oh?” Peter had replied. “But it is not safe for you out there.”

Then above them, where before there had been silence, came the cries of combat and clanging of steel. That was when Wendy knew that he wouldn’t let her leave, not without a fight.

*

“I will deal with Peter,” Wendy said. After all, she had done so before. “Tell me where he is.” A stiff breeze blew in off the ocean, filling the tattered sails of the Roger. Out in the open sea, a flash of iridescent scales. Hook smirked, then gazed up, like a beatific saint.

“Atop the cliffs, in the Never Woods, I hear the boys running,” Hook said, closing his eyes. “And the sound of cannons and other weapons, fast and deadly.”

“Guns?”

“Aye. The boys have turned it to a battlefield.” He patted the sand next to him, an invitation. “Wendy, you were right to come to me. Neverland is a terrible place for us grown-ups.” He shuddered. “You’ll see.”

The man looked wet and miserable, like a dog missing the warmth of its master’s hearth. She remembered a younger James Hook, one with fire in his eyes, so desperate for love he’d commanded her, a child, to be his mother. Those eyes, once the bright, baby blue of forget-me-nots, were now the color of the lagoon, a watery blue-grey. And she could see clearly now, in a way she’d only suspected then, that Hook was what happened when Lost Boys were allowed to grow up this side of the second star.

She could see in Hook’s face the boy he might have been, once: beautiful, heartless, self-important, just like Peter. Except in adults, that same heartlessness lost any pretense of innocence; it was callous, malicious. Irredeemable.

Would she have become like this horrible man, had she not had the prudence to escape, to flee? She thought back to her younger self, imagined her childish weaknesses and assumptions magnified. Would she have become a villain, a harpy fixated on the rigid sort of mothering brewed from fairy tales, resentment, and a child’s distortion of adulthood? Or something more akin to the mermaids: a monstrous open maw, hungering for whatever scraps of love, attention, or praise a child deigned to offer her?

Those would-have-been-Wendys flanked her now, watching Hook pitilessly. They thought they understood motherhood and motherlessness, a distillation of her parents’ example and Peter’s rejection. A world made simple, cruel, and grossly deficient.

But they did not have a daughter. They did not have Jane.

So Wendy did not sit on the sea-darkened sand. Instead, she dug out her bag of salvaged pixie dust. There was barely a teaspoon’s worth left at the bottom. If she had to get up the cliffs or fly further inland to find Jane and have any hope of getting home, the help she needed was from the fairies, not this washed-up pirate. She’d have to board The Jolly Roger.

“I didn’t come for you,” Wendy said to James Hook, setting her shoulders back. She sprinkled herself with two more large pinches of the heady dust.

“You need me,” Hook snarled, “and you’re not the only one with unfinished business with Pan.” He seized her ankle with his one good hand. In that moment, the other-possible-Wendys collapsed into one: the girl she’d been at thirteen, bound and shivering in her nightgown, forced to watch Michael walk the plank.

But there were no more pirates and she was no longer a little girl. And Wendy had not stayed behind, to curdle into someone like James Hook. She’d gone back to the Mainland, to the real world, and grown up, for better or worse. She’d had a daughter of her own, who was more terrifying, at times, than this man had ever been. In fact, if there was one thing Wendy had gotten better at with age, with motherhood, it was this:

“No,” she said firmly, removing Hook’s hand from her ankle. She turned and walked away from him down the beach, figments of those almost-Wendys winking out behind her.

⁂

Once, Peter and Wendy had been trapped on the spit of stone that was Marooner’s Rock out in Mermaid’s Lagoon. The evil Captain had speared Peter with his hook before fleeing the even sharper teeth of a crocodile. The tide was coming in and drops of Peter’s blood bloomed in the water. They lay on the rock panting in the thick, oncoming dusk.

Then a mermaid seized her by the ankles and tried to pull Wendy under. She’d screamed and Peter had dragged her back out of the surf. But the tidewaters of the lagoon had risen to Wendy’s waist by then, the water an icy blade of terror sawing at her belly. She and Peter were too tired to swim or fly to safety.

“Do you mean we shall both be drowned?” she’d asked. Peter’s eyes were bright with a keen fervor, which should have been proof enough that these calamities had all been his intention, from his grievous injury to the rising tide. But Wendy had only been able to stare, frozen, toward the inescapable tidal wave of her own mortality, the cold ocean gripping her ribs.

Then, as if a miracle, Michael’s magical kite had drifted by and Peter had bound Wendy to it, sending her soaring for the shoreline. She had no control of the flight, nor her destination, but thought it gallant, him securing her rescue before his own. That’s what it meant to be a hero, surely.

But Peter did not save himself; a mother did. From across the lagoon, a lone Neverbird had paddled her nest to the boy so he could sail it to safety. Peter had once told Wendy not to disturb the mother Neverbird’s floating nest, though sometimes he took the liberty of skipping stones across the water, trying to land them in it, to the bird’s great dismay. But here she was giving her nest up to Peter, even as her eggs lay cupped inside, warm and vulnerable, though there wasn’t room for Peter and the eggs both.

Wendy had watched from her buffeted perch, a cold fear tumbling in her stomach as the Neverbird covered her face with her lovely, white wings. They both knew Peter cared only for himself. And still the Neverbird had given him her nest with its precious eggs. Why? What was it about being a mother that made sacrifice so implicit? Did the Neverbird feel obligated to return Peter’s protection? Or was it simply that, as on the Mainland, all creatures, especially females, contorted themselves to accommodate the needs of boys before themselves?

“One girl is more use than twenty boys,” Peter had told Wendy to get her to come to Neverland. He’d held out his hand and she had taken it. She had thought it the finest of flattery but had never thought to ask: more useful to whom? And for what purpose?

Peter saved the eggs after all and everyone applauded him, none louder than the Neverbird herself. For doing the right thing when he so easily could have done wrong and not been faulted for it.

*

The Jolly Roger looked like a beached whale, pale and huge against the tropical blue sky. Wendy tried to shake off Hook’s curses echoing off the cliffs behind her and the stuttering of dread behind her heart and set her sights on the Roger’s bleached hull.

As she drew closer, she began to feel a kind of vibration. A hiss. She soon realized the sound was the sand beneath the bow of the ship, buzzing and hopping against the aged wood as the whole ship shuddered. Wendy’s face grew crimson. Fairies might not be human, but they were creatures, and she couldn’t begrudge them their needs.

Everyone had needs. But only some were allowed to act.

To board the ship, Wendy closed her eyes and tried to remember joy. It finally came to her: an anniversary, their first one, where her newly minted husband bought her a peacock-blue scarf. The blossoming warmth of such a perfect gift. The eagerness of their lovemaking beneath the skylight of their first home together, that tiny loft with a just-fashionable-enough address.

When she opened her eyes, Wendy was hovering near the crow’s nest of the ship, the ocean spread beneath her like cerulean silk. She almost wished her husband was here to see the crystal blue waters, the winking, rainbow coral beneath the waves.

Almost.

That anniversary had been Before. Before Jane. Before the apocalyptic Zeppelin raid that had set fire to her little life. Before she’d had to move back into the home where her abductor could find her. Before her husband’s tenderness had turned tedious.

Wendy stumbled down onto the deck of The Jolly Roger, scraping her hands on the splintering wood, the grief of homecoming hanging like weights around her neck. All about her were tangles of light, tumbling through the air like illuminated puffs of dandelion seed.

Fairies.

She could feel their frenzy through the deck, up through her hands and knees. A trembling desire bloomed between her legs. She pressed them together, but that only intensified the sensation, an arc of pleasure straight up her abdomen. No, no, she could not allow herself to be controlled by desires, certainly not now and not in Neverland. That was what had honed Peter into a needle of misfortune: pure desire. And she would not allow herself to be anything like Peter Pan.

Wendy staggered to her feet. She was suddenly conscious of her body, the size and breadth of herself, standing among the tiny, pulsating fairy forms. The boat smelled of trees turned to soil and the rot beneath. Of sludge and saltwater. Despite the blinding sunlight, Wendy couldn’t help feeling like she’d stumbled into a dank marsh or a dark wood. Or a party gone sour.

“I’m looking for my daughter,” Wendy said to the lights, her voice ragged. “Her name is Jane. Peter has her.”

It took a moment for the glowing gyrations to slow and stop and stare at her, shifting swiftly from magical to menacing. They closed in on her, their drone like a swarm of wasps. Wendy dug down to the bottom of her bag and came up with the handful of nails she’d packed. She wielded them at the fairies like a shield. They flowed away from the iron, cursing at her in wind-chime and sleigh-bell voices.

“I don’t want to hurt you, but I need to find her. And to do that, I need dust.” She tried to hold steady, despite the air humming with hundreds of wings.

One glowing speck drew away from the crowd and flew close, right up to her face. She flinched, involuntarily. It touched her lower lip and Wendy let out a small gasp. So close, the fairy smelled like the compost spread beneath the lilacs, rich and sultry. Wendy could just make out the curve of the fairy's body inside its glow, wings a hummingbird blur. She swallowed. The fairy circled her slowly, then chimed at her.

What would she give them? Oh what wouldn’t she give them. She dug in her bag and offered up biscuits and chocolate. The wall of fairies jangled and twinkled at her, laughing. No, they didn’t want anything sweet.

Her bitterness. They would take it from her, in exchange for the dust and directions. Fairies were so small they could only feel one thing at a time. Lust had been a lovely distraction, but they were ready for something fresh, jagged. There weren’t many newcomers to Neverland. And the fairies were hungry too.

Bitterness should be an easy feeling to give up. But her bitterness drove her, got her here, got her up every morning. It had carved her jaded heart into a weapon. Without the bitterness, what was left?

Wendy was afraid to find out. But she said yes anyway.

**

It was months before Wendy heard from Michael, after he’d run off to enlist. The first telegram she received said he’d be home on leave for a week, come Saturday. Her parents came in from the countryside and they went together to the train station.

But when the train pulled up and the soldiers poured out through clouds of steam and oil smoke, she couldn’t find her brother. Just a forest of brown uniforms that made all the young men look the same. Private Michael Darling, who eventually emerged before them, bore scant resemblance to the boy who had joined up. He was taller, his mustache a cruel hook across his upper lip, grey eyes struggling to focus, as if he had cataracts like their father. Like he was peering through a fog.

Their mother flung her arms around Michael, leaving Father unmoored in the sea of disembarking passengers, shouting “What, what? Is the boy here?” Wendy gently guided him to her brother, whose face was a rictus of distress, clutching his rucksack as he had once gripped his stuffed bear after a nightmare. Wendy had almost thought to bring that worn, old toy. She was glad she hadn’t.

At 14 Kensington Park, she had Cook prepare Michael’s favorite meals and put fresh, butter-white daffodils in his room. But he stared at everything as if it was alien. Wendy knew that feeling intimately. When she’d brought Jane home for the first time, her sense of space and time had been recalibrated. Hours crawled by, days blinked away, everything was experienced through a new level of attention. She saw it in the way Michael moved through the old house. Like a wild animal, feeling out the confines of its cage.

“Stop,” he finally snapped at her. “Stop following me around everywhere.”

“I just,” she’d stammered, “I want to make sure you’re alright. You haven’t been yourself.”

“I’ve been to war, Wendy. I am every ounce of myself. There is nothing wrong with me. It is the rest of the world that tilts towards madness. Gliding along above as if nothing were wrong, while darkness lurks beneath.” He stared into his cup of now-cold tea in the lemon light of the sitting room.

“I understand …” Wendy began, reaching for him, but Michael slammed the cup down so hard tea sloshed over his hands onto the pristine tablecloth.

“Michael, you will wake the baby,” Wendy hissed, tucking her shaking hands beneath her arms.

“Let her wake,” Michael said, his voice strangled. “She has that liberty, to wake safe in her bed. When I return to the front, that is not a luxury I shall have.” He lifted the half-empty tea cup to his lips, hands trembling. “Do not presume to know what war is like, Wendy. You are safe because I do know, and you do not.”

“Do you forget why I live beneath this roof?” Wendy lashed back. “Had I been asleep when the incendiaries dropped, I would not be here to serve you tea. I know something of war.”

“Why do you think I volunteered?” Michael snapped, too loud. Far at the top of the house, in the nursery, baby Jane began to wail. Michael put his head down, hands gripping his hair.

“Oh, Michael,” Wendy said, softly. She sat down beside him at the table, but he launched away from her.

“No,” he said. “It is not for you to try to protect me.”

As if caring for her baby brother was something she could ever halt or harness. It was a reflex, not a service. She had certainly never expected gratitude for the ways she had kept him safe as he grew up: from their father’s harshest demands, from schoolyard bullies, from Peter Pan. And neither his height nor uniform, she felt, acquitted her of that responsibility for him as her youngest brother.

Above them, Jane’s howls increased to the keen of an air siren. Michael winced, knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the table.

“Can’t you make her stop?” he said, through gritted teeth.

“Of course, I will see to her,” Wendy said, standing to clear away his dishes, biting her tongue against any recriminations. Maybe that was the problem. She had given her life to service, been expected to, and never thought to seek or receive gratitude. He had chosen service, without knowing the weight of its ungracious obligations.

“You are right, Michael. You do protect us. Thank you,” she said, hoping to assuage his feeling. But he looked at her with such disgust that she immediately turned and fled. In the nursery, she tried to soothe Jane, but it was impossible when she herself was so discomfited. She had tried so hard to protect Michael, but through her diligent care, she had held from him any lessons of responsibility by taking them upon herself. Now her brother had been forced to learn those lessons on his own, in blood and bullets.

**

As one war ended, another was just beginning. Jane had been a sweet baby, reminding Wendy much of Michael in that respect, but even as Armistice was declared, Jane’s willfulness became clear and she and Wendy began to engage in an endless series of their own battles.

Nannies deemed Jane too difficult, too inconstant to be reformed. Wendy wished they could see the Jane she knew was tangled inside all that want and demand: a brave, sensitive child who struggled to conform to the needs of others because she did not know how and nor see a reason to. Wendy knew what it felt like not to fit. She had tried to make herself into the expected shape and form: demure woman, obedient wife, doting mother. And Jane absolutely undid her.

Wendy had picked out a new dress for Jane, that had been her first error. She’d hoped it would be a peace offering. The fabric reminded her of one of her own mother’s dresses and how protected she’d felt, pressed against her mother’s emerald skirt. But the safety of such a dress was her comfort, not Jane’s. Her attempt at parlay met a blockade.

“You didn’t even consult me,” Jane said, “on the dress or even whether I want to go to this beastly party.”

“It is the company Christmas party,” Wendy said sternly, exasperated. “The affair is for families. It would look poorly for your father to show up without his.” Her husband seemed content to be passed over for promotions, but Wendy was not. She hoped to appeal to his employer’s better nature by showing off a charming wife and daughter in need of provision.

“I have no interest in eating Christmas pudding with Father’s colleagues and their dull children. I will stay here, I can look after myself.”

Wendy’s own father never missed an opportunity to tell her she coddled Jane too much, gave in too easily to her whims. Wendy knew all about whims, had worked hard over the years to scrub herself clean of them. The dress had been a setback. She was paying for that now.

“You will do no such thing,” Wendy said, gripping the dress. “We are all going to the fête and you will look splendid in this dress. You love green.”

“The dress is hideous,” said Jane, folding her arms. “You cannot make me wear it.”

“I purchased this dress for you at great expense,” Wendy said, slowly, deliberately. “I would’ve been more than grateful to wear a dress this fine at your age. Any young girl would be.”

“Well, give it to some other girl, then,” Jane said. With that, she snatched up the dress, stormed over to the window, and before Wendy could reach her, opened the casement and flung the garment out into the wintery night. It fluttered, like a child trying to take flight, before landing in the snow far below.

Wendy slapped her daughter.

She hit Jane hard across the face, just as the girl was turning toward her mother triumphantly. Jane staggered back, cheeks red with shock and fear. Wendy felt something in her rear up, like she was leading the charge against a band of pirates. It felt ugly. And right.

“You will go out,” Wendy said, “and you will fetch that dress. You will hang it in the kitchen to dry. Then next week, when we go to the party at the very fine home of your father’s employer, you will wear that dress with your good black shoes. And there will be no more protests, do you understand?”

Jane did not respond, just gave Wendy the same look Michael had when she’d denied their past with Peter Pan. The truth sank in, then. Her daughter might love her again after this, but things would always be different between them. In her anger, she had shown weakness. A crack in her defenses.

Just wide enough for Peter to slip in.

*

Wendy woke up hacking as she accidentally inhaled a breath of fairy spores. They coated her mouth and tongue. She looked down to find she was covered all over in cold mud and a tingling, shimmering miasma of pixie dust.

The woods she’d been dropped in were leafless and mud filled; nothing like the adventure-laced enchanted forest she remembered from her youth. Despite the bright light of the beach, the air here was dim, oppressive. There was the plaintive sound of birds and wind, but nothing that made her want to venture deeper in.

She pulled her bag out of the mud and found it full of shifting, sparkling dunes of dust.

Well, the fairies had wanted all her bitterness and they’d repaid her in kind. She sat now, seeking out the splintered places inside herself to see what remained. There was still pity and sorrow, even anger, ripe and bright. But all that had been bitter was now brittle.

Which wouldn’t get her daughter back.

The ratatat of guns echoed among the bare trees.

“Jane?” Wendy called, trying to move through the thick mud. She grabbed a tree trunk to steady herself. “Peter?” The woods went quiet around her.

Then from behind the trees emerged soldiers, sepia-toned and mudslick, helmets pulled low, guns out. Pixie dust spilled from her bag until she found the handle of her kitchen knife.

“Stay back!” Wendy shouted, sweeping the blade in wide arcs. The infantrymen drew closer. Their features seemed to shift as they stepped in and out of the shadows. Was that one Michael? The wry smile seemed familiar. They were all young, nothing more than boys. There were too many of them. She couldn’t save them all.

If they even wanted to be saved.

Something exploded beside her ear, and she screamed. One of the soldiers burst apart, as if he was made of mist or sand, a shattered reflection and shower of pixie dust. Wendy dropped to a crouch, covering her ears. More gunshots, more shattered ghosts. She turned around.

A beam of sunlight suffused the haze of the woods, illuminating Peter Pan. He looked exactly as he had when he’d stolen her away, except dressed in an officer’s uniform, his cap cocked jauntily across his brow. He grinned at her, balancing a rifle against one hip, its bayonet glinting in the weak light.

The thirteen-year-old girl inside her felt a stab of want that took her breath away. The thirty-five-year-old woman she was in this moment expected the jagged stab of bitter loathing she’d cultivated in the years since. Instead, her heart broke a little, seeing him, and she thought, Mercy, he really is just a child.

Peter held the gun casually, his face full of bemused curiosity. Not an ounce of recognition, an absence both crushing and a relief.

“Hullo,” Peter said, with a taunting grin. “Friend or foe?”

Both, she wanted to say. What was this hook that made her feel as if she needed to earn his admiration? She was old enough to actually be his mother. There was no reason to try to please him. She shivered, shuddered, couldn’t seem to get warm.

“It’s me, Wendy,” she said. Peter had nothing but disdain for grown-ups. After the poor state of James Hook—who, in truth, deserved it—she wondered if she wasn’t making a mistake in telling him the truth. Pretending was always easier. He had taught her that.

Peter Pan tipped his head. “Wendy? What’s a Wendy?”

**

When Wendy received word that Michael was missing-in-action, she left baby Jane in the cook’s flour-coated arms and went straight to Kensington Gardens, hoping for some sign of Peter Pan. She knew it was Peter’s favorite place to steal away children, so she usually avoided it, but Wendy felt certain that if she found him, he could find Michael. But Kensington Gardens had been transformed into its own war zone. Lush lawns had been overturned for soldiers to practice digging trenches: long, deep brown scars in the earth where the roses used to be. Sandbags piled to her shoulder, lined with curls of barbed wire. She could almost see her little brother, curled around a cigarette in the mud of the trench, grinning up at her. Or was that Peter’s grin she was imagining on her missing brother’s face? It began to rain. She stood there staring at the washed-out trench until a soldier she didn’t know came by and guided her back to the street.

Though she had written him off long ago, Peter’s absence was a bitter sting. She had hoped he would step in again, as a hero, preserve her brother as she could not. But that was a fool’s thinking; she knew the truth of Peter and his bravado. It was stolen, like so much else.

Still, Wendy left the window open for weeks afterward. There was nothing but a damp, cold draft.

*

Peter marched Wendy, at gunpoint, to his new hideout. It loomed out of the fog, a large wooden fort surrounded by barbed wire.

“What have you done with Jane?” she demanded.

“Silence, prisoner!” he said, “Or you’ll feel the cold steel of my bayonet.”

More gunfire spat from the forest behind them. Ghost soldiers, shifting from the woods, too many to count. Peter turned to meet them, a feral glint in his eye. Wendy dropped to the ground again, just as a hailstorm of bullets turned the phantoms into explosions of sparks and smoke. The deafening clatter continued until there was nothing of the soldiers but winking dust. Wendy ventured a glance at the fort and there, on the parapet, straddling a machine gun, was her Jane, still in her pale yellow nightgown, hair a wild conflagration. She was beautiful and fierce and looked, dangerously, right at home.

Peter crowed with pleasure. “Our latest recruit to Pan’s Army is a fair shot!” From the fort came cheers and whoops. Peter gestured for Jane to join him. She came down through the gate in a pair of army boots, a rifle cradled in one arm. She stopped when she saw Wendy, a frown tracing her lovely face.

Peter slapped Jane on the shoulder. “Thatta boy,” he said. “I’m putting you in charge of our first POW.”

Jane shot Peter a glare that Wendy knew too well. “I’m not a boy, I keep telling you.”

Peter looked quizzical. “Well, what are you, then?”

“A girl,” Jane said, lifting her chin and her gun.

“Oh,” Peter said, carelessly. “Girls can’t be soldiers.”

“You said I could do what I pleased here,” Jane insisted.

Peter weighed his gun in his hands. “Girls are far too clever to be soldiers,” he finally decided, with a definitive nod. “No, you’re to be a nurse. Every platoon needs a nurse. You’ll take care of our injuries and make us take our medicine and tell us stories to cheer us during difficult nights in the trenches.” His face grew solemn, contemplating, surely, other people’s sacrifices in those battles rather than his own.

Like heat rising off her, a distortion marred the air around Jane, and quite suddenly she was no longer in a nightgown, but in a nurse’s uniform, stark white, with a crisp white cap and red cross. Jane looked down at herself, eyes wide, gun still gripped tight. She plucked at the fabric. Solid. Starched.

“Now you look the part,” Peter said, his grin like a mouth full of pearls.

Wendy had a horrifying vision of Jane trapped here like James Hook, caught in awful tempers even as an old woman, snared in the shadow of Peter’s waning attention.

“Jane does not belong to you, for you to do with as you please,” Wendy spoke up, trying to draw the boy’s focus, though she knew it would draw Jane’s ire. “She’s my daughter. She must come home with me.”

“What is a ‘daughter,’” Peter said, wrinkling his nose.

“I don’t belong to anyone!” Jane shouted, tearing off the nurse’s cap and throwing it into the trees.

I made you! Wendy wanted to cry out, to wrap her arms around her precious, ferocious child. Shouldn’t that give her some power, some control over Jane and her choices? But it never seemed to. She held her breath and counted the buttons on Peter’s uniform, letting her fears unspool.

“A daughter is a person, Peter.” Wendy did not look at Jane as she spoke. “One with her own intelligence and wit, strength and cleverness. One that has a mother who cares for her very much and wants to see her safe.”

“Oh, you have come to speak to me about Mothers,” Peter scoffed. “Nasty things. Make you wash behind your ears, go to bed at night, and take lessons during the day. They don’t let you run through the woods or howl at the moon or fight to the death. Mothers only try to make perfect little children with spit-slicked hair who say please and thank you but never have an original thought. It is mothers,” he said, spitting out the word, “that turn children into adults.”

It was supposed to be a taunt, but Wendy would not have it.

“What did he promise you, Jane?” she said, keeping her eyes on Peter. “Never having to grow up?”

“And flying,” said Jane, excitement creeping into her voice. “Heroic battles. Adventure. Freedom.” She hefted the gun. “All the things you will not allow.”

“Children are not meant to stay children. Not forever,” Wendy said, this time with eyes only for Jane. “There is so much more to the world than what children can reach. There is plenty of adventure to be had.”

“But children see all that is worth seeing,” Peter said. He slung his gun over his back, adjusted his cap. “Come, Nurse, this conversation grows dull. Let us go inside and find a proper place for our prisoner.”

“I told you, I’m not—” Jane began.

“Come home, Jane. I will keep you safe,” Wendy cut in. “Here you will only ever be what fits Peter’s story.”

“And whose story must I fit at home, Mother?” Jane said, brushing hair out of her face. “For it certainly isn’t my own.”

The words were Wendy’s slap, wielded with precision. Jane was right. The world they had left was no more kind to girls than Neverland, especially for fighters like Jane. What safety could she promise her daughter that would be any different? There was safety and a future behind the walls of a house, in the arms of a husband, at the bedside of one’s children. Wendy wanted to wrap her child in the safest story she knew. One in which Jane would, no doubt, suffocate.

“Neverland may feel like an adventure, but stay here long and it becomes a prison,” Wendy insisted. “Peter hasn’t told you about what he has done to the pirates, to the mermaids. He is playing war, but what is real and what is illusion make no difference to him.”

“You can’t die for real in Neverland,” Jane scoffed, her eyes flicking to Peter. “This is a land of wishes, is it not?”

“Even wishes have consequences,” Wendy said softly.

“I kill things all the time. It is no great task. If I want someone to stay dead, they do,” Peter said, haughtily. He examined Wendy, as if choosing a proper target. “Mothers are no longer allowed in Neverland. Didn’t my boys shoot down one of your kind before? Yes, but you were a bird, were you not?”

Wendy’s shoulders seized and it was as if her back had been sliced open by a bayonet. She fell to one knee and must have made a sound too, because Jane was in front of her, small hands pressed to Wendy’s face, saying Mum? Mummy?

Then Wendy’s shoulder blades unfurled into two great white wings, like that of a Neverbird. She grunted beneath the awkward mass of them. Neverland is a terrible place for grown-ups.

She forced herself to her feet, struggling for balance and trying to ignore the horror of the weighty appendages. She had sworn she would not let Neverland trap her again but here it had her in its grip.

Jane backed away, hands over her mouth. “Peter, what have you done?”

The boy merely shrugged. “Grown-ups are not good for much else, Nurse. Especially Mothers. If you do not wish to become what a Mother would make of you, she abandons you. Replaces you.” Peter’s eyes narrowed. “That is what my mother did to me and no doubt what this one would do to you. This way, I make grown-ups as I will them. She will make for a great quarry, far more interesting than a prisoner.” He slung one arm over Jane’s shoulder.

“No!” Jane pushed Peter away, her face blotchy with held-back tears. “You cannot make us into someone else!” Jane gripped the front of her crisp, white uniform, as if to tear it asunder. Instead, Wendy saw, she was summoning the same distortion Peter had used to dress them both. The space around Jane struggled in and out of focus. The nurse uniform blurred into the brown fatigues of a British soldier, then flickered, for a gut-sinking moment, into the emerald green Christmas dress, a jewel in the dim woods. Then the nurse uniform, and back again.

“Nurse,” Peter said, taking a conciliatory step towards Jane, but Wendy lumbered forward and put her arms and wings out between them.

“She is my daughter,” Wendy said to Peter, loud enough that Jane could hear. “But she is wholly her own person. And she is choosing a course different from either of ours.”

“Get out of my way, Mother,” Peter mocked.

“No,” Wendy said, arms crossed, wings outspread. “I am not your mother. I am Jane’s.”

With a final pulse, the haze around Jane coalesced into her yellow nightgown and, on her feet, the hated birthday galoshes. The rifle she had dropped dissipated into pixie dust, but with a look of intense concentration, Jane caused the dust to amass into a new shape. She picked up the sword and stepped between Peter and Wendy. No fear, no bitterness, all Wendy saw on her daughter’s face was righteous anger. And for a shining moment, Wendy dared to hope.

⁂

The final time Wendy went to Neverland, she had been sure Peter had forgotten about her like he had everything else. Even so, she wore the same nightgown as the night they’d first met, though she’d had to add a panel to the back and several inches to the hemline to make sure it continued to fit. She had felt indecent sitting there, sixteen, waiting for a little boy to come steal her away. She was so nervous she had risked taking a bit of bourbon from her father’s decanter, seeking calm in the liquor’s smooth, smoky burn. Michael had sat up with her, but even he had curled up on the rug and fallen asleep. It was long past midnight and she’d all but drifted off herself when Peter’s shadow fell across the windowpane.

“Wendy,” he crowed, “come with me! Spring is here!” And she’d been so flush with joy to see he wasn’t a dream that she’d taken his hand again and together they’d hurtled into the sky.

“It’s good to have you back, Mother,” he said, twisting in the air. The comment felt barbed somehow, though she tried to ignore it. Wasn’t that why she kept returning, to care for Peter and these boys? Wasn’t motherhood what she’d always wanted? The pain of it stuck in her chest, long after they landed and burrowed their way into Peter’s hideout.

It didn’t occur to her until much later, when her arms were elbow deep in wash water, scrubbing clothes while Peter was off hunting wolves, that what had started as a game for them both, was now only a game to him. She took her role seriously and he did not. What was she hoping for, a future with Peter? There would always be the washing and dirty noses, meals to prepare and floors to sweep, and never once would Peter show an ounce of caring. He only needed her as much (and as long) as he was entertained by her.

The dirty clothes sank to the bottom of the wash bin.

She’d stared down at her hands, pruned like that of an old woman. Was this motherhood, held out like a prize, but wielded as a blunt instrument?

Peter, she was learning, was incapable of feeling. That fact seemed to have no effect on the clenched-fist feeling in her pelvis when they flew together, fingers brushing against the clouds and one another, wind rushing cold up her gown. She was growing up and he was not. She had held so tightly to her own childhood that she had only just begun to untangle the idea that there was more than one kind of love. And that while society considered motherhood a virtue, mothers themselves held little value.

Maybe the truth was she clung to the role of mother, of Peter’s caretaker, because it seemed the only way she could get him to care for her. But Peter cared only for himself. He had no use for her, even as she felt ill-used.

When she’d returned home, she’d locked the nursery window and shoved her old nightgown in the waste bin. She’d stared ferociously at her naked skin in the long mirror in the hall, willing herself to see her own future, however it would emerge, resolving it would not involve Peter Pan in the slightest.

But she didn’t recognize the person she saw there, a girl with a woman’s body, who couldn’t admit how much of her childhood she had given to a dream that wasn’t hers.

*

Among the darkening trees, Peter stared down Jane’s blade with a rueful smile. “Are we to fight, then? I never lose, you know.”

His expression belied a child who had never been denied anything, had never been held to consequence. But Wendy could not hold to the sour feeling that he deserved Jane’s blade. Instead she felt a pang of grief for the boy, even as he leveled his bayonet at them.

“We just wish to leave,” Wendy said calmly.

“But this one does not wish to,” Peter said, cocking his head at Jane. “Look at her, ready to do battle. ”

And with that, he lunged, his bayonet a white flash.

Wendy screamed, but she couldn’t hear herself over the sudden report of a rifle and a violent clang of steel.

Jane had caught Peter’s blade with her own, both hands on the hilt, pressing him back. But Peter’s strength was slackening. He looked down in shock where red was blossoming around a bullet wound on his right shoulder. With a shove, Jane pushed him away and then Jane ran to her mother’s arms. They had both almost died, quite possibly, but for once, Jane needed her and Wendy was embarrassed at her own elation.

Peter collapsed to the ground dramatically, one hand flung across his brow. “Nurse,” Peter cried, reaching for Jane. “Nurse, I’ve been shot! Save me!”

Behind Peter near the fort, there stood a ghostly soldier between the twilit trees, just now lowering his rifle. It was Michael, it had to be. Same eyes, same baby face beneath his mustache, his rage at the world in the shape of a gun. But upon catching her eye and seeing Jane in her arms, he lowered his weapon, anger softening. He gave her a sad smile and mouthed one word:

Fly.

Lost Boys burst from Peter’s fort to help their fallen leader. They were all so small, dirty feet and ears, ill-fitting uniforms. Child soldiers. Peter winced and groaned and assured them all they could go on without him. Then he pointed at Wendy. “Our nurse has been kidnapped by the Mother Bird! Get ’er boys! Take no quarter!”

But around them, the woods were filling with more ghost soldiers, winking into existence between the brown trees. Now a single pursuit had become an ambush. With cries of “For Peter!” and “Huzzah!”, the warrior children stormed toward Wendy and Jane and the ghost soldiers flowed up to meet them. There was the clash of gun and steel. Michael met Wendy’s eyes once again across the battle.

Fly.

Of course. Wendy scooped dust from her bag and Jane into her arms. Someone grabbed hold of one of her wings, tearing out feathers, and through the pain and the overpowering must of pixie dust, she thought: Jane is with me. We girls can rescue ourselves.

With that, Wendy shot up into the sky, breaking through the forest canopy and into the clear dusk air above Neverland, pixie dust trailing behind them like the tail of a comet, bullets and cries following in their wake. The sun spilled firelight across the water and the moon hovered low over the white-washed beaches, impossibly large and the color of old bone. She spread her wings, and the wind caught her too, lifted them higher and higher, like a kite, towards the first stars of the evening.

Behind them, rising from the Never Woods, came the eerie throbbing that still haunted Wendy’s dreams: a Zeppelin’s engine. It loomed up behind them, impossibly large, blotting out the stars. From the gondola beneath its enormous, bullet-shaped hull came the clattering of a machine gun. The bullets tore through Wendy’s wings, rending flesh and bone, and she cried out as her wings disintegrated into feathers and fairy dust. They fell, the cold sea rushing up at them.

She did not trust the magic of Neverland to catch her this time. She was on her own.

No. She had Jane.

“Hold on!” Wendy cried to her daughter, who tightened her cold arms around her mother’s neck. Wendy reached for something happy, even pleasant, anything to keep them aloft. Being a mother. It was her happiest self and also the most agonizing, but in this moment those feelings were inseparable. Being Jane’s mother. A thrill pulsed through her, the pixie dust fueled by her joy mid-tumble and they rode it back up, curving back towards the night sky, the airship’s machine gun shredding the clouds behind them. She did not need to see him to know that it was Peter smirking behind the trigger.

Then, from the beaches, came a loud boom. The Zeppelin shuddered and began to turn broadside. Below, Wendy saw The Jolly Roger lit as if for a Christmas party, pulsing with fairy light, and at the helm, James Hook, curls blowing in the wind, aiming the pirate ship’s large cannon up at them.

“Pan!” the Pirate-General roared, “we aren’t finished yet!” And as fire hurtled at them from above and below, Wendy flew faster and faster, on and on toward the second star until that mad island was barely a shadow behind them.

The night sky deepened to black and blue. Wendy and Jane flew onward, the second star staring at them, distant and unblinking. They had been flying for hours, hadn’t they? Now the sky was almost black and Wendy’s hands were ice. She worried Jane would fall from her numb arms, plummet into the sea. Just a little further.

The star shone on, no closer, but now it multiplied, wavered. The sky was filled with constellations, or was it a reflection? Were they flying towards the sky or plunging into the sea?

No, it was the lights of London in the distance, the Mainland spreading out beneath them, a lamp-lit tapestry. They were going to make it.

“Mum?” Jane said softly, gripping her mother’s sweater. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Wendy said, her body flushing with relief at Jane’s voice. “No, darling, you may grow up at your own pace.”

“But Peter …” Jane’s voice trailed off.

“Peter is of no consequence,” Wendy said. She clutched Jane close with one arm and reached into her bag, then smeared pixie dust along her daughter’s back.

“Think lovely, wonderful thoughts,” she whispered in her daughter’s ear. And let her go.

Jane gasped and dipped for a moment, reaching for her mother. Wendy stayed beside her, pacing her, but did not offer a hand. It took Jane a moment of bobbing alone in the night air before she spread her arms and let out a whoop of joy, diving away into a loop through the midnight sky. She did not look like a child anymore, hardly. She looked like a young woman. And Wendy knew Peter would not come for her again.

Time had its role in growing up to be sure. But so did mothers, who lay the path before their children. She had not served her brother in trying to carry him along it. She had only served Peter, who desired all paths to lead back to him.

In the distance, Wendy heard the deep tones of Big Ben calling out over the city as they approached, its clockface as bright as the moon. It wouldn’t be long now. She closed her eyes, letting the night wind fill her.

“Must we leave?” Michael had asked plaintively when they’d fled Neverland all those moons ago. His hand had been so small and cold inside her own. “Didn’t you see that pirate I killed? I would make a grand pirate, wouldn’t I, Wendy?” She had had the sense then to simply smile, to let him linger in his fantasies. Had they been so different from her own? To be praised? To feel alive?

“We are almost home now, Michael. There, do you see it? Number fourteen?” Wendy had said, pointing.

“I don’t hardly remember it,” Michael had replied, squinting against the wind. “Are you truly not my mother?”

Wendy opened her eyes to find Jane was flying beside her again, framed by the night sky. She released her thoughts of Michael and instead took the warm hand of her smiling daughter. Michael didn’t get to come home. He would keep flying, wherever he was. She hoped he was free, even if it meant he’d never land.

Tears streamed from Wendy’s eyes, as she and Jane swooped down through the clouds. The wind they rode in on whipped through the trees and gardens of Kensington Park, the lamplights flickering as they coasted to where a lit window had been left open for them both.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.