Tiger Lily (31 page)

Maybe it was the delirium that made her talk to me that way. But it kept her awake, and I think her staying awake kept her alive. I brought things I’d found for her to eat and get water from—tiny nuts and berries I knew were edible—and she let me force them between her lips. And before long, someone came looking for her, and tracked her up to the cliffs.

It was early morning when Pine Sap stood in the doorway. He sat on the bed beside her. She let herself sink against his lap. She could feel his spindly legs, smell his familiar smell.

“I could have been stronger,” she said. “I wasn’t enough to keep something so important.”

“Tiger Lily, you’re a fool,” he said, and kissed her forehead. And despite his size, and the fact that a boy like him was not built to shoulder much of anything, he shouldered her weight, and carried her home.

S
ometimes I think that maybe we are just stories. Like we may as well just be words on a page, because we’re only what we’ve done and what we are going to do. I know I’m only a faerie, a tiny speck in the world, but then I look at the things I’ve seen and done, and I become a long scrawly line of something important. And I think it’s the same for Tiger Lily and Peter and even Tik Tok and for my father and for Belladonna, the faerie he ran away with, and for Maeryn and maybe every fish in the sea.

I know that there are different kinds of stories with different kinds of endings. But I can’t say that, for Tiger Lily, it worked that way, with any kind of ending I could pin down. And there were still things I didn’t expect.

The first was that Tiger Lily kept Tik Tok’s promise. She married Giant in a ceremony in the square.

It was like every other wedding that had happened in the village, though a shaman from another village had to come to perform the ceremony. There was dancing and binding and promising. She wore the dress Tik Tok had made her, and Giant looked sullen and ravenous at the same time. But he did not touch her that night. It was as though the arrival of the crows had finally put the fear into him that all the others had felt long ago.

Another thing I didn’t expect was that within two weeks of his wedding night, Giant was dead.

He had been taking a nap alone in his house, but he never woke up. People ascribed it to Tiger Lily’s curse. But they also whispered that he had gotten what he deserved. Aunt Sticky Feet whispered something different. She said she’d seen Moon Eye walking out of his house that afternoon, with an old clay jar of Tik Tok’s. But Aunt Sticky Feet was known to be an alarmist. And even I never knew for sure.

Things were quiet for a long time. We passed the hours the way we always had, and one day leaked into another, and the quiet lasted and lasted. It was fifty years before another ship docked near Neverland’s shores. But what is fifty years when you’re not growing any older?

It was by this time that even the remotest corners of the globe were no longer remote. The mermaids had retreated into the deepest parts of the ocean, lucky to be able to go somewhere they would never be found. The faeries hid, too, in the island’s thickest swamps, and far away from the shore. The tribe didn’t have to. The visitors never came near them.

Still, I noticed a curious sight one morning when I was down on the beach, looking for pieces of the best sand to go in my hair: Tiger Lily in a canoe, paddling out to talk to them. She was still curious. Phillip had not killed her restlessness to know. And they offered for her to go with them if she was so curious. There would be ships coming back this direction in a year or so.

Pine Sap said once that he would rather die than see Tiger Lily tamed. I guess Tiger Lily felt the same about Peter, because she stayed behind. And that is how I, Tink, went to England, instead of her. Because as always, my curiosity outweighed my fear.

I arrived in London in early spring—took up residence in a bush by the docks, where I could keep an eye on the lizards and flies, which were small and unintimidating. I was dazzled and awed by the girls, the dresses, the electric lights, and the buildings made of stone. I also immediately longed for home, the woods, the river, even my swamp. I wanted to leave London almost as soon as I arrived.

As the days passed, I put off seeing Peter. I found other things to do. Weeks trickled by, and still, I steered clear of the neighborhood Wendy had talked about, which I found on maps but did not visit.

It was only toward the end of my stay, during a winter of a kind of coldness I could never have imagined, and when I knew one of the rare ships that sailed close to Neverland was slated to depart in two days, that I found my way to Finsbury Circus, and the big yellow house. I was both relieved and unnerved to find that it still stood, exactly as Wendy had described it.

That afternoon, I had seen snow for the first time. It muffled everything, and made it feel so silent and gave me a quiet feeling, just a peacefulness and a waiting for new things to grow. It was cold, and my wings moved stiffly. My breath puffed out around me, but no one in London paid attention to insects. Up on the second floor, there was a balcony. I flew up unnoticed, and looked in the window.

There was no one home. But peering through the glass, I couldn’t imagine anywhere more comfortable and safe, or more like everything Peter had always said he didn’t want. It was a room full of books, but unmistakably, it had Peter’s stamp on it. His carvings sat on various shelves, miraculously complete. An old handmade bow sat in the corner. A plant sat on the windowsill—grown from a cutting I recognized. It was a big-leafed, wild-looking plant that grew all over Neverland. It crept up the corner near the glass, and seemed to have a life of its own, branching out in all crooked directions. I wondered what had prompted Peter to keep it. As if he could keep the wilderness in a pot.

But even now, without him there, it was impossible to think of him in the comfortable room, growing older and breathing indoor air. Fifty years later, and I still didn’t understand him.

A door opened to the left, and my breath caught, because in he came. I was frozen still, peering in, unable to move, and sure he wouldn’t see me, but his eyes went to me immediately. A huge smile spread across his face and he walked to the window, and pulled it open, the warm air spilling out on me as I’m sure the cold air spilled in. Only, it wasn’t Peter. The nose was different. The teeth were bigger. There was no savage about the eyes. I realized my mistake.

He opened the window. “You can’t be real,” he said. He must have been twenty or more years old. I flapped my wings, trying to acknowledge him. He appeared utterly flustered, his cheeks bright red, puffing in amazement. He reached for me, but I zipped backward.

“Sarah, come look!” he yelled over his shoulder. He turned to me. “Are you looking for my father?” he asked, half joking.

He seemed to be speaking rhetorically, and must have considered me a dumb creature. He reached out and petted the top of my head, with Peter’s gentle touch. “He’s walking in the park, little one. Come in from the cold. You’re a treasure!” He reached out again to catch me, but I finally found my wits and flew back and away, and swooped down above the street. I was gone before he could employ a more effective tool to capture me. The Englanders, I knew, loved to study things to death.

On my way toward the house earlier, I’d flown past the park—a big oval, powdered pure white, below me. I found Peter there. He was walking in a direction away from the house, and I flew in behind him. I would have known his thin chicken-wing shoulders anywhere. I knew his animal gait, even when he moved slowly.

I’d never seen Peter in a coat. From the back, he was gray-haired. I flew closer, so that I could see the pores of skin on his neck, my tiny heart in my throat, and suddenly my courage left me. It turned out that my curiosity did not outweigh my courage after all. Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they’re not what you hoped for them. I turned and went back to the docks, and waited the two days for my ship to leave. It was the last I would ever see of Peter.

By the time I got home, a year had passed. And much had changed.

The most surprising thing, to me, was that Tiger Lily and Pine Sap were to be married.

She talked to me now. After the stone house, she hadn’t stopped. She told me they had just been walking into the river one day, getting ready for their usual swim, when she knew. She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.

For weeks, I saw it as a tragic turn of events. But when I tried to see him through Tiger Lily’s eyes, I began to see it differently. She laughed with him, more often than she had laughed with Peter. Her heart beat strong and steady around him, as if he gave it strength. I could hear that she loved every piece of his crooked face, without an ounce of fear.

Some words meant something different to Tiger Lily than they ever had before; some sentences waited years to grow full in her mind. Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was. And though there were many people who loved Tiger Lily in her tribe, and many people Tiger Lily loved, that was what she was left with. There were three people who loved her exactly as she was. Tik Tok. Pine Sap. And me.

Their marriage surprises me all the time, because it’s always changing. It looks nothing like the love Tiger Lily had with Peter, but it is as big in its own way. They go swimming in the reeds together, and she holds on to Pine Sap’s neck and wraps her legs around him and he swims like a dolphin. In the water, he can carry her. They sit in front of their home that Pine Sap built and he calls the birds to her fingers and she laughs that easy laugh. Sometimes she treks in the woods without him for days. But at home Pine Sap talks about poems and the countless things he thinks about, and Tiger Lily feels as though his mind is a forest, too, and that she is discovering a new place.

Their daughters are hungry, joyful little souls, but only one of them is half feral like her mother. The other is as girlish as any girl ever born. Moon Eye, who surprised everyone by living as long as anyone, also surprised them by marrying a Bog Dweller she met at a gathering of the shamans, after she took on Tik Tok’s role as medicine woman.

I don’t know when Tiger Lily stopped growing older; I can’t pinpoint the moment. But I do know I never saw her visibly age beyond the days when she was with Peter. I like to think her growing stopped the day they were on the plateau, watching the horses. Sometimes I can almost convince myself that on the ridge that night, I actually heard her bones grinding to a halt, her skin pause, because that simple day was the most important thing that would ever happen to her. Just an afternoon, when nothing amazing occurred, except that she felt completely happy and completely at home. But truthfully, even I couldn’t have heard these things.

Now there are days when she is content, and days when she’s restless. But there is never a day when she doesn’t see Peter everywhere. Things hurt, and don’t hurt, and hurt again. Eighty years later, and she can still feel surprised that he’s gone. And then so much of the time, she’s glad. But just as she looks for Tik Tok in everything around her, she looks for Peter in the woods, out gathering, in the lagoon, in the burrow that is now abandoned. She goes up on the cliffs from time to time and stands there for hours, continuing her long good-bye. It’s not for lack of loyalty to her husband. It is just that she was fifteen once for the first time, and Peter walked across her heart, and left his footprints there.

For my own part, I must admit I spend more and more time thinking that I should go home. I keep wondering if it’s time to be back with my own family, and to be somewhere that feels like I belong there, even if it isn’t perfect. And I keep putting it off. I am always saying, when the moon has set thirty more times, that is when I’ll go back to the swamp. But I keep on staying.