“Well, I have,” said Hans. “It all has to do with storying.”
“Storying?” She came a step closer, her breath pluming out before her. He could smell the coldness of it.
“As I was lying here,” Hans said, “thinking over my long life—for that is something humans do, you know, when we reach the end—I realized that I have stood alone almost continually since I was a child of five. However kindly people behaved toward me, I still remained cut off from them. And this, I believe, was the bargain we made.”
“Ah,” she said, but nothing more.
“You told me when I made my wishes that I would understand the payment much, much later. It does not come any later than this.”
She nodded, saying nothing, for indeed, what need was there for her to speak? Hans had told the truth.
“You gave me poetry and stories, even a story about you,” Hans said, sitting up in the bed despite the pain of the cancer. He ground his fist against his belly to quiet the ache.
She gazed at him without pity, even though she understood how much the talking cost him.
“You knew my soul longed for true recognition as a thirsty man for water, and had so even as a child.”
This time when she smiled, it radiated from her eyes. They were greedy eyes, hungry eyes, a witch’s eyes.
He leaned toward her despite the pain. “But I realized today that you kept as payment any love that I would have ever gotten. Not from a woman, not from a man. So I never had a single grown person in the entire world who loved me just for myself.” Hans shifted his position, trying to find somewhere comfortable, but his body would not obey him. Finally he stopped trying and, with that, the pain seemed for a moment to cease. “I never married, never had a home of my own, always lived in someone else’s house.” He made a small gesture with his head, indicating the very room they were in. “I am even going to die in someone else’s house.”
“A fair trade,” the Snow Queen said, her voice satisfied. “I have made the same barter with poets and writers and musicians and—”
“Ah, yes, you do not think yourself a witch, but did it ever occur to you that you are a fairy godmother?”
“Never!” she cried, and he realized he had scored a point. Something like a smile passed across his plain face and made him seem almost handsome.
He took a moment more, covering the intense pain with another smile, before saying, “Your mistake was thinking there is only one kind of love.” The pain in his gut was sharp again, and he had to stop, take a shallow breath, before going on. But the years of storytelling helped him here, and he made the moment of silence work for him.
“I make no mistakes.” Now the Snow Queen stood very still, arms folded, like a woman who knew how to wait. He had met very few of them in his long life.
Then the pain ebbed a bit, like a receding tide on an Odense beach, and he told her the rest. “You see, my dear ice witch, I have had the love of children from all over the world because of my stories. A child’s love is the perfect love, for it is given with a whole heart. That love will outlast me a hundredfold. And it will outlast you as well.”
“Never,” the Snow Queen said, but her voice was way too high, and her face contorted in anger. The tic he’d noticed earlier was beating again under her right eye, but this time it was more pronounced.
“Oh, I am sure of it,” said Hans. “The children will know you from my story, and in that story you lose to little Gerda because of her perfect child’s love for Kay. And here, in this room, you lose again.” He held out his hands, but not to her. She began to tremble, then collapse, and at the last dissipated into water vapor.
Hans no longer saw her. His gaze was focused past the vapor and beyond, his hands held out to the other figures gathering in the room, a group of small children from all over the world, wearing crowns of roses.
One of them, whose crown was made of just the briars and thorns, tiptoed over to Hans’s bedside. Now holding the dying man’s hands, he said, “We are here to bring you home, Papa Hans, but first you must tell us a story.”
“With all my heart,” Hans said. “It is about a beautiful witch who was outwitted by an ugly old digter.”
So saying, he sat up straight on the bed as if he were as young as they, and told them that one final story about his life as a fairy tale. When he finished, the children all clapped their hands and laughed delightedly, and his old worn-out body fell back against the waiting pillow, no longer in pain. But his spirit, set loose of the body’s gravity, rose to go hand in hand with the children through the stone walls of Mrs. Melchior’s great house, into the soft Danish air, and home.
Lost Girls
It isn’t fair!” Darla complained to her mom for the third time during their bedtime reading. She meant it wasn't fair that Wendy only did the housework in Neverland and that Peter Pan and the boys got to fight Captain Hook.
“Well, I can’t change it,” Mom said in her even, lawyer voice. “That’s just the way it is in the book. Your argument is with Mr. Barrie, the author, and he’s long dead. Should I go on?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Darla said, coming down on both sides of the question, as she often did.
Mom shrugged and closed the book, and that was the end of the night’s reading.
Darla watched impassively as her mom got up and left the room, snapping off the bedside lamp as she went. When she closed the door there was just a rim of light from the hall showing around three sides of the door, making it look like something out of a science fiction movie. Darla pulled the covers up over her nose. Her breath made the space feel like a little oven.
“Not fair at all,” Darla said to the dark, and she didn’t just mean the book. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.
But the house made its comfortable night-settling noises around her: the breathy whispers of the hot air through the vents, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, the sound of the maple branch scritch-scratching against the clapboard siding. They were a familiar lullaby, comforting and soothing. Darla didn’t mean to go to sleep, but she did.
Either that or she stepped out of her bed and walked through the closed door into Neverland.
Take your pick.
It didn’t feel at all like a dream to Darla. The details were too exact. And she could smell things. She’d never smelled anything in a dream before. So Darla had no reason to believe that what happened to her next was anything but real.
One minute she had gotten up out of bed, heading for the bathroom, and the very next she was sliding down the trunk of a very large, smooth tree. The trunk was unlike any of the maples in her yard, being a kind of yellowish color. It felt almost slippery under her hands and smelled like bananas gone slightly bad. Her nightgown made a sound like whooosh as she slid along.
When she landed on the ground, she tripped over a large root and stubbed her toe.
“Ow!” she said.
“Shhh!” cautioned someone near her.
She looked up and saw two boys in matching ragged cutoffs and T-shirts staring at her. “Shhh! yourselves,” she said, wondering at the same time who they were.
But it hadn’t been those boys who spoke. A third boy, behind her, tapped her on the shoulder and whispered, “If you aren’t quiet, He will find us.”
She turned, ready to ask who He was. But the boy, dressed in green tights and a green shirt and a rather silly green hat, and smelling like fresh lavender, held a finger up to his lips. They were perfect lips, like a movie star’s. Darla knew him at once.
“Peter,” she whispered. “Peter Pan.”
He swept the hat off and gave her a deep bow. “Wendy,” he countered.
“Well, Darla, actually,” she said.
“Wendy Darla,” he said. “Give us a thimble.”
She and her mom had read that part in the book already, where Peter got kiss and thimble mixed up, and she guessed what it was he really meant, but she wasn’t about to kiss him. She was much too young to be kissing boys.
Especially boys she’d just met. And he had to be more a man than a boy, anyway, no matter how young he looked. The copy of Peter Pan she and her mother had been reading had belonged to her grandmother originally. Besides, Darla wasn’t sure she liked Peter. Of course, she wasn’t sure she didn’t like him. It was a bit confusing. Darla hated things being confusing, like her parents’ divorce and her dad’s new young wife and their twins who were—and who weren’t exactly—her brothers.
“I don’t have a thimble,” she said, pretending not to understand.
“I have,” he said, smiling with persuasive boyish charm. “Can I give it to you?”
But she looked down at her feet in order not to answer, which was how she mostly responded to her dad these days, and that was that. At least for the moment. She didn’t want to think any further ahead, and neither, it seemed, did Peter.
He shrugged and took her hand, dragging her down a path that smelled of moldy old leaves. Darla was too surprised to protest. And besides, Peter was lots stronger than she was. The two boys followed. When they got to a large dark brown tree whose odor reminded Darla of her grandmother’s wardrobe, musty and ancient, Peter stopped. He let go of her hand and jumped up on one of the twisted roots that were looped over and around one another like woody snakes. Darla was suddenly reminded of her school principal when he towered above the students at assembly. He was a tall man but the dais he stood on made him seem even taller. When you sat in the front row, you could look up his nose. She could look up Peter’s nose now. Like her principal, he didn’t look so grand that way. Or so threatening.
“Here’s where we live,” Peter said, his hand in a large sweeping motion. Throwing his head back, he crowed like a rooster; he no longer seemed afraid of making noise. Then he said, “You’ll like it.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t,” Darla answered, talking to her feet again.
Peter’s perfect mouth made a small pout as if that weren’t the response he’d been expecting. Then he jumped down into a dark space between the roots. The other boys followed him. Not to be left behind, in case that rooster crow really had called something awful to them, Darla went after the boys into the dark place. She found what they had actually gone through was a door that was still slightly ajar.
The door opened onto a long, even darker passage that wound into the very center of the tree; the passage smelled damp, like bathing suits left still wet in a closet. Peter and the boys seemed to know the way without any need of light. But Darla was constantly afraid of stumbling and she was glad when someone reached out and held her hand.
Then one last turn and there was suddenly plenty of light from hundreds of little candles set in holders that were screwed right into the living heart of the wood. By the candlelight she saw it was Peter who had hold of her hand.
“Welcome to Neverland,” Peter said, as if this were supposed to be a big surprise.
Darla took her hand away from his. “It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” she said. This time she looked right at him.
Peter’s perfect mouth turned down again. “It’s big enough for us,” he said. Then as if a sudden thought had struck him, he smiled. “But too small for Him.” He put his back to Darla and shouted, “Let’s have a party. We’ve got us a new Wendy.”
Suddenly, from all coners of the room, boys came tumbling and stumbling and dancing, and pushing one another to get a look at her. They were shockingly noisy and all smelled like unwashed socks. One of them made fart noises with his mouth. She wondered if any of them had taken a bath recently. They were worse—Darla thought—than her Stemple cousins, who were so awful their parents never took them anywhere anymore, not out to a restaurant or the movies or anyplace at all.
“Stop it!” she said.
The boys stopped at once.
“I told you,” Peter said. “She’s a regular Wendy, all right. She’s even given me a thimble.”
Darla’s jaw dropped at the lie. How could he?
She started to say “I did not!” but the boys were already cheering so loudly her protestations went unheard.
“Tink,” Peter called, and one of the candles detached itself from the heartwood to flutter around his head, “tell the Wendys we want a Welcome Feast.”
The Wendys? Darla bit her lip. What did Peter mean by that?
The little light flickered on and off. A kind of code, Darla thought. She assumed it was the fairy Tinker Bell, but she couldn’t really make out what this Tink looked like except for that flickering, fluttering presence. But as if understanding Peter’s request, the flicker took off toward a black corner and, shedding but a little light, flew right into the dark.
“Good old Tink,” Peter said, and he smiled at Darla with such practice, dimples appeared simultaneously on both sides of his mouth.
“What kind of food . . .” Darla began.
“Everything parents won’t let you have,” Peter answered. “Sticky buns and tipsy cake and Butterfingers and brownies and . . .”
The boys gathered around them, chanting the names as if they were the lyrics to some kind of song, adding, “. . . apple tarts and gingerbread and chocolate mousse and trifle and . . .”
“And stomachaches and sugar highs,” Darla said stubbornly. “My dad’s a nutritionist. I’m only allowed healthy food.”
Peter turned his practiced dimpled smile on her again. “Forget your father. You’re in Neverland now, and no one need ever go back home from here.”
At that Darla burst into tears, half in frustration and half in fear. She actually liked her dad, as well as loved him, despite the fact that he’d left her for his new wife, and despite the fact of the twins, who were actually adorable as long as she didn’t have to live with them. The thought that she’d been caught in Neverland with no way to return was so awful, she couldn’t help crying.
Peter shrugged and turned to the boys. “Girls!” he said with real disgust.
“All Wendys!” they shouted back at him.
Darla wiped her eyes, and spoke right to Peter. “My name is not Wendy,” she said clearly. “It’s Darla.”
Peter looked at her, and there was nothing nice or laughing or young about his eyes. They were dark and cold and very very old.
Darla shivered.
“Here you’re a Wendy,” he said.
And with that, the dark place where Tink had disappeared grew increasingly light, as a door opened and fifteen girls carrying trays piled high with cakes, cookies, biscuits, buns, and other kinds of goodies marched single file into the hall. They were led by a tall, slender, pretty girl with brown hair that fell straight to her shoulders.
The room suddenly smelled overpoweringly of that sickly sweetness of children’s birthday parties at school, when their mothers brought in sloppy cupcakes greasy with icing. Darla shuddered.
“Welcome Feast!” shouted the boy who was closest to the door. He made a deep bow.
“Welcome Feast!” they all shouted, laughing and gathering around a great center table.
Only Darla seemed to notice that not one of the Wendys was smiling.
The Feast went on for ages, because each of the boys had to stand up and give a little speech. Of course, most of them only said, “Welcome, Wendy!” and “Glad to meet you!” before sitting down again. A few elaborated a little bit more. But Peter more than made up for it with a long, rambling talk about duty and dessert and how no one loved them out in the World Above as much as he did here in Neverland, and how the cakes proved that.
The boys cheered and clapped at each of Peter’s pronouncements, and threw buns and scones across the table at one another as a kind of punctuation. Tink circled Peter’s head continuously like a crown of stars, though she never really settled.
But the girls, standing behind the boys like banquet waitresses, did not applaud. Rather they shifted from foot to foot, looking alternately apprehensive and bored. One, no more than four years old, kept yawning behind a chubby hand.
After a polite bite of an apple
tart, which she couldn’t swallow but spit into her napkin, Darla didn’t even try to pretend. The little pie had been much too sweet, not tart at all. And even though Peter kept urging her between the welcomes to eat something, she just couldn’t. That small rebellion seemed to annoy him enormously and he stood up once again, this time on the tabletop, to rant on about how some people lacked gratitude, and how difficult it was to provide for so many, especially with Him about.
Peter never actually looked at Darla as he spoke, but she knew—and everyone else knew—that he meant she was the ungrateful one. That bothered her some, but not as much as it might have. She even found herself enjoying the fact that he was annoyed, and that realization almost made her smile.
When Peter ended with “No more Feasts for them with Bad Attitudes!” the boys leaped from their benches and overturned the big table, mashing the remaining food into the floor. Then they all disappeared, diving down a variety of bolt-holes, with Tink after them, leaving the girls alone in the big candlelit room.
“Now see what you’ve done.” said the oldest girl, the pretty one with the straight brown hair. Obviously the leader of the Wendys, she wore a simple dark dress—like a uniform, Darla thought, a school uniform that’s badly stained. “It’s going to take forever to get that stuff off the floor. Ages and ages. Mops and buckets. And nothing left for us to eat.”
The other girls agreed loudly.
“They made the mess,” Darla said sensibly. “Let them clean it up! That’s how it’s done at my house.”
There was a horrified silence. For a long moment none of the girls said a word, but their mouths opened and shut like fish on beaches. Finally the littlest one spoke.
“Peter won’t ’ike it.”
“Well, I don’t ’ike Peter!” Darla answered quickly. “He’s nothing but a long-winded bully.”
“But,” said the little Wendy, “you gave him a thimble.” She actually said “simble.”
“No,” Darla said. “Peter lied. I didn’t.”