Tiger Lily (12 page)

Tiger Lily looked out at the mermaid. She thought of Peter underwater, with the darkness, the mud, the fish, and the hidden places. The things he would see that she likely never would.

“He can’t even swim,” Nibs said. “The mermaids have to do the paddling for him.”

“Mermaids can’t help being killers,” Slightly said. “He shouldn’t go in there.”

“They can help it if it’s Peter,” Tootles said. “Everything goes his way.”

Slightly rolled his eyes, but Nibs rubbed Tootles’s head affectionately. He seemed to be the only one who sensed Tootles needed extra attention.

“We’re lucky. He looks out for us.” Nibs took a sip of his drink, and noticed Tiger Lily watching him curiously.

“We learned how to drink by spying on the Bog Dwellers. We watched how they made beer. We were getting bored of everything else.”

The mermaid made a splash as she slithered back into the water. I was glad. There was something menacing about the way she had sat watching.

The boys launched into the dance part of the night as best they could for a group of only boys. Curly played a long bamboo flute. The twins sang. I found a place to watch from a fern. They all became unrecognizable as the night went on. Tiger Lily sat like a statue, hands on her knees, back straight, out of her element. As they grew sloppier and less alert, the twins argued too loudly about whether Tiger Lily was ugly or beautiful, and finally agreed that she was “ugly beautiful.” Tiger Lily pretended she hadn’t heard, but her heart slowed to absorb the blow. Tootles and Nibs performed a small, spontaneous skit, and Slightly did a little ballet that made everyone laugh. Some of the boys played cricket with a skull for a while. Every time Tootles came to bat, he’d go running from base to base, holding his sagging pants up from behind, but not fast enough to keep half of his backside from being revealed in all its pale glory.

The more the boys drank, the more delinquent they became, Peter most of all. Curly put down his flute and started trying to light little things on fire. Peter showed them how to pull down a branch with his teeth, and chased Nibs into the trees and tackled him, making him scream, “Peter is the king and will live forever,” before he’d let him up. Finally, Nibs took Tootles’s hand and they slow-danced, each leaning against the other, like rag dolls. The twins soon did the same. It was proof of their loneliness for other people that they were willing to lean on each other so much, and Slightly played songs on Curly’s flute that grew slower, more thoughtful, and melancholy.

I watched with a tugging feeling of sadness for them. I even had a passing longing for home. Faeries had dances too.

Nibs must have noticed that Tiger Lily was sitting alone, because abruptly he rose, made a direct line for her, and asked her to dance. They lumbered about. She stepped on his feet many times and barreled them both into a tree. It became a source of embarrassment—all eyes were on them—but Nibs courageously kept at it, clearly not wanting to desert her.

It was as quick as a blink: one minute she was falling into Nibs again, and the next she was caught squarely in front of Peter, his arms adjusting her so she’d dance steady, though it was the blind leading the blind, as Peter was no dancer either (he only seemed convinced he was). He lurched back and forth, correcting Tiger Lily with his hands.

“You just do this,” he said. “It’s easy.”

Slightly, wobbly from drink, had started banging on a makeshift drum. “Don’t you ever try to be quiet?” Tiger Lily asked Peter.

“Why would we?”

“To keep the beasts away.”

“The bad things are some of my favorites,” Peter said. Tiger Lily couldn’t tell if he was a fool or only fearless. With most people, she would have thought the former. But it seemed possible that Peter wasn’t scared of anything.

She looked around at the others, boys collapsed against each other in slow dances. “In our tribe, dancing is sacred,” she said thoughtfully.

“Nothing here is sacred,” Peter said. His mouth tilted to the left in a smile.

“That must be hard,” she said. Peter frowned.

“Why did you come back?” he finally asked, changing the subject.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s been boring without you. Even though you only came that once.” He tugged her close and seemed to hold on to her tight. Tiger Lily went stiff, and pulled back a bit, resembling a briar. Peter didn’t seem to notice and kept firmly clasping her waist, but when the music ended, he let go of her hand without a thought. Later she found him surrounded by the boys, talking about a near escape from one of the pirates. They were all riveted, even though—she knew from the story—most of them had been there. Peter was animated, his cheeks flushed, a picture of both boyish excitement and a grown kind of toughness. He could have been talking about bananas, and the group would have been just as enrapt.

Sweaty and awake from the dancing, Tiger Lily stood with the others, arms crossed standoffishly, but included.

Finally you could tell—by the distinct quiet around the woods that came when the night animals had gone to sleep and the day animals were not yet awake, and the smell of buds and greenery just beginning to unfold for the morning sun—that it was the hour before dawn, and Tiger Lily knew she would have to get home.

The others, now half asleep and lying on the ground, listening to Slightly tell a story about roaches, didn’t notice when she got up. She slipped off into the darkness without saying good-bye and, sitting in her collar, I saw him coming up behind her. For all his bragging, his confidence in this one talent was well-founded: I never saw anyone sneak up on Tiger Lily but Peter.

“I think we could be good friends,” he said, falling into step with her. “It’s perfect because I wouldn’t fall in love with you, like I do with the mermaids. Girls always seem so exotic. But it would be okay with you, because you’re more like … you know. Not like a girl.” He shrugged. “Will you?”

“Will I?”

“Be friends.” At that moment, I envied Tiger Lily for the first time.

“Here,” he said, stopping her by holding her arm. He knelt before her. There were the same thin shoulder blades, like chicken wings. The thong of her shoe had come lose, and he tied it, and looked up at her while he did, causing her to hold her breath.

“When you come back, I can fix it permanently.”

“I shouldn’t come back,” she said.

His mouth settled firmly in a frown. “But you’ll be back. I know you will. You won’t be able to let us go now.”

A
few days later, I was asleep down in her suede blanket when I heard her stir, and then leap. Beside her on her pillow was a gift from Giant: Aunt Fire’s wedding bracelets.

Tiger Lily folded her long legs underneath her, kneeling on her bedroll and holding them in the morning light. She sat like that for a long time, and then, before walking out, she slipped the bracelets onto her wrist, like she knew she would be required to. It was as clear a message as any that their marriage was still on.

Outside her door, the children had made a pile of rocks. There were dusty fingerprints on her house where they had touched it and run away.

The women were preparing a boatful of fermented caapi water for a ceremony. They did this by sitting and chewing and chewing crushed caapi vines. It was one of the things Tiger Lily hated most, because it required sitting still for so long.

She sat with them, and a few eyes drifted to her wrist.

Aunt Agda handed her a vine to chew, but with a warm, sorry glance.

Sometimes Tiger Lily’s heart beat for her village. This was one of those times. They could believe her to be cursed, fear her and whisper about her. But they still cared enough to sympathize with her.

A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime. Aside from rare instances, like in the case of my father, we are built to mate for life. I went back to the burrow many nights, and watched Peter. I tried to talk sense into my hard little heart. But it had landed on Peter, a creature two hundred times my size and barely aware of me, and there was no prying it loose.

Without Aunt Fire to spy on her, Tiger Lily escaped as often as she could, but she didn’t go back to the burrow. Maybe she feared there were different ways of being trapped than the ones she already knew. She often spent the mornings before the rain set in looking for snakes and then going to lie down in a meadow not far from the outskirts, where she could watch the clouds.

She was sleeping in the tall grass when we heard a papery noise—grass rubbing against itself—and she sat up rod straight.

I saw him before she did. He was emerging from the edge of the woods, with something brown and furry squirming in his arms. He wore a worried expression as he studied Tiger Lily. In his muddled thoughts I could catch that he was nervous to see her, though I didn’t know why.

The squirming shape he held was a tiny, mewling wolf pup. “Her mother is dead,” he said. “Caught in a trap. I thought of you.” He walked toward her through the tall grass. Moths and grasshoppers burst into the air with every step. “The mermaids can’t take him of course.” He smiled, teasing.

It had been weeks since she’d seen him. His brownish hair was shaggier, but he was freshly washed. His skin was pale and he looked thoughtful, his forehead crimping, the breeze blowing at him and making him squint in the sun that filtered now and then through the clouds. He was wearing a pair of English pants that he had no doubt recovered from the shipwreck and cut off at the knees. I waited for him to look at me like he had before, but if he noticed I was there, he made no sign of it.

Tiger Lily suddenly caught his meaning. “
I
don’t want him. He’s an animal.”

“So am I,” Peter said, shrugging. “I’ve got fur.” He pointed to his head. He grinned. “And feet. So are you.”

Tiger Lily blinked at him. To the Sky Eaters, there couldn’t be more difference between people and the animals.

Peter knelt next to her, and held the pup out by its armpits, so that it squiggled and licked its own nose. She looked at the tiny helpless creature, but didn’t move to take him.

“Are you impressed I tracked you here?” he asked.

Tiger Lily sank back on her hands, unsure. Tracking came to her as easily as breathing. “Should I be?” she asked earnestly.

Peter dropped his chin, looked down at the wolf pup, and finally up at her again.

“Do you want him?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“But he’ll die.”

“You take him.”

Peter knelt, and his shoulders sank. “I can’t. I’m not good with living things. Or taking care of things. Or being that nice. Or anything like that. The fact that Baby’s still thriving is a miracle. I’m not much of a girl.”

“People say I’m not much of a girl either,” Tiger Lily said. She thought of Tik Tok, who was fond of saying that people were all bits of each thing, boy and girl.

Peter waited, then laid the pup in her lap. Then he moved its thin black lips as if it were talking. “Please love me,” the wolf said, with Peter’s voice. “If you don’t, I will probably die a horrible death.”

Tiger Lily didn’t give him the looked-for laugh, but she let her hand fall onto the wolf’s head. She felt the soft warmth of its still forming skull.

Without a word, she had agreed to take the wolf, and Peter saw this agreement, and smiled to himself. “Moon Eye will want him,” Tiger Lily said. “She wants to mother everything.”