Neverland (23 page)

I became itchy with hives, as if a cold wind had come up. I knew sometimes when to leave a room, when not to talk to strangers, when something bad was going to happen so that I might avoid it. I wouldn’t call this anything more than common sense or intuition. But for some reason, in Neverland, this ability was deadened. I knew I should’ve stopped this, but I was fascinated. Nonie and Missy stood, grabbing at the air, reaching higher, hopping up as if the lightning bugs were getting away from them.

Sumter grinned happily, his face dark with dried mud. “C’mon, Beau,” he beckoned. “It’s
beautiful
.”

Missy wiped her bloodstained wrist across the wall, creating a dark spiral smudge right beneath the words, no grown-ups. Nonie was lapping at her own wrist, her lips stained brown while the yellow candlelight aged her face. “It’s more than beautiful,” Nonie said delicately, as if she could not waste her breath. “It’s . . . it’s . . . delicious.”

She offered her wrist for Missy to taste.

Her twin kissed the cut.

I could not look at them. They seemed too hungry.

I felt itchy with fear, but I wanted to be a part of what they were doing. I did not want to be left out. I was more scared of being left out than of what was in that crate.

I watched my sisters’ shadows on the far wall and then Sumter’s, which was fainter than theirs. And among those shadows I saw another. A shadow among shadows, a dimly glimpsed figure. It dwarfed all of us as it slid up the wall, a dark stain forming a body as it moved up toward the low roof of the shack.
The All
, Sumter’s voice told me,
the Great Feeder, the Great Father.
And then it was no foreign shadow at all, but my own among the other children’s as I stepped forward, over the candles, toward the crate that contained our god.

 

MY MEMORY draws a blank there: I only remember digging my hand into the opening of the crate and then a period of blankness.

I awoke with a queasy stomach.

We all had what looked like blackberry stains on our faces, and I felt warm and goofy and dizzy. The candlelight had turned smooth and white, and when I tried to stand, I felt a little sick.

“It tastes like something,” Missy said stupidly.

“Tastes like blood,” Sumter giggled.

Nonie got the joke and laughed also.

“I don’t feel so good,” I said, plopping back down into the dirt again. I held my hand up. I was sure my fingers would’ve deflated like a balloon after all the blood they’d all been licking at. The blood around my wrist had pretty much dried, although Sumter kept swiping at it, trying to get another lick. I shivered, crossing my arms on my chest. “Am I the only one who’s cold?”

“Are we Draculas?” Missy asked.

“Stupid,” Nonie huffed. “You’ve got to be
dead
before you can be a
vampire.
And you get bitten on the
neck.
Sometimes I wonder about you.”

“Don’t call me stupid, stupid.”

“You cold?” I asked Sumter.

He shrugged. “A little.”

“I’m tired,” Missy sighed, and then she seemed to awaken to her surroundings. She pointed at the walls. “Lookit!”

Nonie covered her ears with her hands. “You don’t have to screech.”

I followed Missy’s pointing finger up. There was more writing all over

the walls, thick, loopy writing from our blood.

The writing was not ours, although the handprints surrounding it were. Beneath these words was a tapeworm of blood stretching across half the wall:

These few words would be our commandments.

As if reading from a most peculiar Bible, Sumter closed his eyes and said in a voice that sounded like someone else was speaking through him, “First rule of the tribe of Neverland: Thou shall have no other gods before me, says Lucy. The second is like unto it: no grown-ups. Steal and kill and do what you will.”

The following morning we became thieves.

Stealing came quite naturally to us, and I’d be a liar if I were to insist that I had never stolen anything before. I spent five minutes every morning going through the pockets of my father’s khakis taking spare change and half-opened Wint-O-Green Life Saver rolls. We approached our first thefts to the greater glory of Lucy and Neverland with gusto and spirit; we’d given ourselves a kind of green light to snooping and sneaking and pretending we didn’t know that certain items in the household had been taken. Nonie began sneaking cigarettes from Aunt Cricket’s purse, and we spent an entire afternoon sitting in the shack while a fog of tobacco blinded us. We coughed all the while we puffed away on the Salems, and we felt the refreshment of clean air in our lungs once we stepped out to walk along the bluffs. Missy took to stealing utensils from the kitchen, and although this seemed less gutsy than Nonie’s thefts, Sumter emphasized that Lucy wanted us to steal, and these were the first fruits.

I was the bad egg of the group, because every time I thought I would steal something, Mama or Daddy would come in the room and I’d feel guilty for having even thought to take something that wasn’t mine. Sumter pulled me aside while I brushed my teeth and told me, “You’ve got to steal something
special
, Beau, if you want to be part of Neverland.”

After spitting out in the sink, I said, “What if I don’t want to?”

“You do. I know you. You do.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Well, then, you don’t. But if you do want to be
in
, do it soon. That’s all. Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

 

I DIDN’T struggle with this moral dilemma at all. I knew I’d probably steal something. I longed to, just because I wanted to feel good inside the way I’d felt in Neverland drinking Sumter’s blood.

One morning I had my chance.

The peninsula was caught in a fog, and Grammy Weenie, who rarely wanted to go out in the midday sun, begged to have someone take her down to the beach—“Just to sit and watch the water.”

Missy and I stared out the window at the wispy mist that crawled across the front lawn and bleached out the trees and the bluffs. She whispered to me, “Don’t you think it’s scary?”

I almost laughed. Nothing seemed scary anymore—or rather, everything that had once been scary now seemed like fun. We had been drinking each other’s blood and writing dirty words on the walls.

She revised her question. “I mean scary in a good way.”

“Mama,” Aunt Cricket said, as if placating a child, “of course Ralph and me’d be happy to drive you down, but you won’t be seeing much ocean in
this
.”

“I have sat in this house quite enough for one summer,” Grammy insisted, “and you can either take me down there in your car or I will crawl down myself.” She was wearing her thin lace dressing gown and had drawn it almost up to her knees to pick at a thread that was coming loose. Her legs were shriveled and skinny and almost completely pale blue with all the veins coursing on the surface. Her stockings, which she always wore, were rolled and wadded around her ankles.

Daddy was buttering toast, leaning against the sink. “Rowena, we’d be delighted.” The crunch he made when he ate his toast was like walking across gravel. He seemed remarkably happy this morning; I thought it was the fog, because fog made me happy, too. It meant it would be a cool day, at least until afternoon when the sun and humidity would burn it off.

“We can take the Chevy,” Uncle Ralph volunteered, not wanting my father to be the hero of the day.

“No, I’ll ride in the wagon, then I can take my chair,” Grammy said. “Where’s Evvie and my grandchild?”

Daddy said, “Still upstairs. She said she’d skip breakfast.”

Aunt Cricket and Uncle Ralph exchanged glances. Mama had been drinking last night: It was written across everyone’s faces.

Mama was humming to Governor when she finally came down.

Julianne arrived before nine and pretended that we children didn’t exist. She only had six days left with us, and it was becoming obvious that she didn’t need the work anymore. You could tell that she didn’t like Sumter at all, and whenever she could, she said something unkind about him. “Baby Hitler’s looking a little tired this morning,” she said to him, scruffing his hair up backward so that he winced. “It’s a dirty bird that messes its own cage.”

“What she mean by that?” Missy whispered.

Sumter said, “She’s on the rag.”

If we had walked down the path, we would’ve made it to the beach in five minutes. But because of Grammy Weenie’s legs, we drove down a dirt road that took us twenty minutes out of our way, protected on either side by the barbed wire of blackberry bushes. Daddy drove slowly because the fog was so thick. We were all squeezed in together in the very back, feeling like we were smothering; Grammy and my aunt and uncle in the middle seats; my parents with Governor up front. Governor seemed as much in awe of the mist as we did: His eyes were wide, and he made his happy noise, which went
dit-do, dit-do,
like a bird chirping. Daddy parked the car where the road met the rocks. There was no one else in sight.

The sea apparently ended at a white wall several yards out, and the beach seemed a thin strip of dirt. Uncle Ralph and Daddy carried Grammy Weenie out of the wagon and set her, with some pillows, down upon a large, flat rock. Sumter was wearing his long pants, as we all were, and he rolled them up to his knees, kicking his flip-flops off in the sand. He waded in the shallow surf. My sisters, like gawky ducklings, followed him in, rolling their jeans up, too. Nonie kick-splashed Missy.

“It’s warm!” Missy cried. “Oh, wow.”

The grown-ups huddled around Grammy, who nodded and pointed as they spoke. It was a calm. Air did not move, waves did not crash. We existed
for the moment in a fog crate. Only the keening gulls informed us of the great wide world. We were a family here. I ran ahead of my sisters, avoiding the surf the way the sandpipers did, running ahead of it, too, and then back down as the water receded. I looked back at them and they were gray shadows against the whiteness. I could not even see my parents back near the car. As I ran up the shore I saw someone else standing in the surf: a fisherman with high boots on, looking out into the water. All around him pelicans dove into the thin glassy waves. He wore a baseball cap and beneath his overalls had on a pale blue shirt. But he had no rod. What was he fishing for without a rod? But he pulled something up from the water: a large hooped net, which he proceeded to drag through the sea with an almost gentle, tender action.

“Hey,” I called. “Whatcha fishing for?”

But the man didn’t hear me. He turned and walked through the water, parallel to the shore, occasionally bending forward to drag his net in the sea. Small feeder fish danced on the surface, as if being tossed up from below just for him, but they were not what he wanted.

I looked back again and saw a white day behind me. No family, no nothing. Fog was everything.

I wanted to go home, not for the usual home reasons, but because this would be my opportunity to fulfill a Neverland commandment:
steal
.

Again I began running, and didn’t stop until I’d reached the path up the side of the bluff, back to our property. I trudged carefully up it, glancing over my shoulder occasionally to see if I’d been missed. When I reached the top, I looked back over my shoulder. The fisherman was just a gray shadow passing through whiteness. The fog hid him from me.

Steal.
Sumter’s voice in my head.

I headed to the Retreat. I would steal something good for Neverland, for Lucy.

 

THE HOUSE was quiet in a way it could only be at the end of summer: like a vault. Inside its airless chambers you would not believe that a world existed outside.

“Hello?”

My voice came back to me. Flat light sliced beneath the drawn shades. The downstairs was brown and yellow: Color seemed shocking after coming out of the mist. I walked room to room, kitchen to den to bathroom, and back around again. Julianne was supposed to be here. There were some fat red steaks defrosting on a blue plate. Grease stains around the counter. The kitchen was as filthy as we’d left it. None of my family were very good house-keepers. Bad cleaning habits had been passed down from generation to generation, from the Giantess of Biloxi all the way to me. And Julianne Sanders had apparently absorbed our casual messiness by osmosis—we could never be comfortable with a perfectly clean house. But all the evidence of Julianne was here: the steaks, a carton of milk left out, vegetables soaking in the sink. Big green flies batted at the kitchen window from the inside.

“Julianne?”

I wandered back through the kitchen to the back door. Julianne parked her run-down Volkswagen Bug there. I looked out the door’s window. The sun was burning off the haze. I could see all the way to the next house down the road. It was in slightly worse shape than the Retreat. A woman was on the porch poking a broom into the eaves, unraveling spider webs or batting at a wasp’s nest. Julianne’s car was gone. She must have gone into town on an errand. She would be back shortly.

If I was going to steal something of value, I would only have a few minutes.

I took the stairs two at a time. My aunt and uncle’s room appealed to me. It had been Grampa Lee’s old bedroom and was the largest of the four. The enormous four-poster bed against the wall was about as large as the room I slept in. Sumter’s roll-away cot was next to the window. The shades were drawn. Grammy’s Victorian dollhouse and doll collection, in its glass case, had been moved from their usual sunny location beneath the window and pushed up against the wardrobe. I went over to the dresser. Aunt Cricket had left her Salems carton on the marble top, with cigarettes scattered across the smudged wax surface of the cherrywood border. A length
of pantyhose hung out from a crack in the top side drawer, beckoning me with its suggestion of intimacy.