But the most striking thing about him was his control over and denial of his body. The villagers painted their bodies with messages and meanings—they liked to tattoo themselves with symbols, painted their faces to mean different things. Phillip seemed to float above his body, like it was just an attachment. He didn’t seem to revel in the food Tiger Lily and Tik Tok faithfully brought him, or fresh air, or dangling his feet in the river on hot days the way the villagers did. The only things he took pleasure from seemed to hide somewhere in his head.
He spoke to Tiger Lily from time to time, singling her out.
“I’ve never experienced a heat like this,” he’d murmur, fanning himself and his sweaty, shiny bald head. He told her about his wife back home, who had died three years before. “She settled for me,” he admitted one afternoon. “I always knew she loved someone else. But God works in mysterious ways.” Tiger Lily listened to all of this patiently, only half understanding the things he meant. She wanted to ask questions, but there were too many to begin. She was proud that he was alive partly because of her. And tending to him was a welcome respite from her other duties in the village.
Since his mother’s death, Giant had gone from tolerating Tiger Lily to actively hating her. He purposely made messes for her and created extra work that sometimes kept her up late into the night so that she couldn’t go to the burrow at all. He liked to berate her in front of others, and in private—because Sky Eaters had no tolerance for men hitting women—he had even tried to knock her down twice with a slap. Though much to his frustration, it was almost impossible to knock her over.
Tiger Lily was invulnerable. She wrapped her secret around her like a blanket, and it kept her warm over the next few weeks, when people in the village eyed her, or whispered in their usual way. Tik Tok often looked at her, puzzled, while they sat to eat or mix medicine together. But he didn’t ask her any questions. It was his way to wait for her to tell him.
She was carrying boiled water to Giant’s house one afternoon when she noticed Pine Sap slipping out of the village with a hatchet.
“Where are you going?” she asked, just at the tree line.
“For a walk.” His spindly arms clutched the hatchet, his feet rooted firmly and his stance listing slightly to the left because of the subtle curve in his spine.
“With a hatchet? Into the woods?”
“Yes,” he said, daring her with the smile that grew on his face. “Don’t worry, Tiger Lily, I’m not going to look for poison for Giant.”
“You’d be a murderer,” Tiger Lily said.
He leaned on a hip. “Tik Tok always exaggerates. I don’t have the heart for murder. Let me help you with that.”
He took the bucket of hot water from her before she could resist, and they dropped it off in Giant’s empty house. “Let’s go somewhere before he gets back.”
So deep was her distraction that she didn’t wonder again about the ax he’d been taking into the woods.
They walked down to the bend in the river. It was a brutally hot day—even the breeze was hot—and the cool river water, trickling down from the mountains, was too inviting to ignore.
Without a word, they both started undressing.
Tiger Lily went in before him, impatient. But Pine Sap knew her impatience well, and didn’t expect her to wait for him. He followed her upriver. They blew on the grass blades to make them whistle. She gave him a wet smile, and her smile made her beautiful. Her teeth were as white as shells.
She sank underwater and held on to Pine Sap’s calf.
They waded into a batch of reeds. The river had carved natural paths through the tall river grasses, so that there were miniature hidden trails they loved to travel, knowing no one in the world could see or find them. For others, this might have felt lonely, but for Tiger Lily and Pine Sap, it had always been a welcome respite from people’s eyes.
“Where do you go to at night?” Pine Sap asked suddenly, softly, as if the answer didn’t really matter.
Tiger Lily sank her mouth under the water, then raised up slightly. “Red jasmine, for stomach problems. You have to gather it at night.” She said it so quietly that anyone would have known she was lying. Especially Pine Sap, who spotted lies so well.
“It’s okay,” Pine Sap said. “You don’t have to say.” They were quiet for a while. “Do you like Phillip?” he asked.
Tiger Lily nodded.
Pine Sap shrugged. “I don’t.”
“Do you think you’ll catch aging?” she asked.
He shook his head. The villagers believed less and less that aging was something they could catch. “It’s not that,” Pine Sap said.
Tiger Lily didn’t pursue the thought further. “Maybe he will take me with him to England, when the ship comes to take him back,” she said. She hadn’t dared voice this thought to anyone.
“You’d leave the tribe?” he said.
“Instead of marrying Giant? Yes,” she said decisively. The idea that going away on a ship would mean saying good-bye to Peter didn’t enter her mind.
“I could never leave,” Pine Sap said.
“Why?” she asked.
Pine Sap shrugged, and gestured in the direction of the village. “Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.”
Tiger Lily hovered, her mouth open as if to speak. But I don’t know what she would have said, and at that moment Moon Eye walked by, Midnight in her arms—though he was already growing way too big to be carried. She looked like her thin bones would crack under his weight. It was an infectiously charming sight, and Pine Sap smiled big at her.
“He’s not a baby,” he said.
“He is sort of my baby.” Moon Eye stared down at the wolf in her thoughtful way, with a little motherly smile.
“Come in the water,” Pine Sap said. Moon Eye smiled gently but shook her head.
But Tiger Lily climbed up—covering her torso with one hand and dripping all over—and put wet hands on Moon Eye’s cheeks, and together they got her to put the wolf down and coaxed her into the river, in her tunic. Midnight sat on the shore and whined, spoiled already.
Moon Eye came into the reeds with them, and they all spit water at each other. For a moment, Tiger Lily felt jealous, because the reeds had belonged to her and Pine Sap, and because Pine Sap smiled so much at Moon Eye, who had so many of the traits Tiger Lily never would, like softness, and breakableness. But for a moment, she also felt so at home in the village that she let the jealousy slip out of her fingertips, and she even almost forgot about the burrow and Peter entirely. But only almost.
TWENTY-ONE
If I’d never really known Tiger Lily was an animal, I knew it now. Tiger Lily was a beast, and the boys were too, and they were beasts together.
She resisted, at first, giving in to all the things the lost boys gave in to. The way they lay on the leaves for hours while the villagers would have been hard at work cultivating their crops, making improvements on their homes, and squirreling away food for the rainy season. The way they covered themselves in mud when they got hot, while the Sky Eaters liked to clean and groom themselves three or four times a day. How they pushed each other out of the way when they wanted to get somewhere and how they sometimes grunted instead of spoke. But it all worked on her, and slowly she let herself get dirty and unruly too.
It was easiest to slip away right after dinner, when villagers were busy catching up with each other and broken into their separate, small groups. So, though from time to time she was able to get away for an afternoon, evening was burrow time. She could stay away till long after the Sky Eaters were asleep, and those who noticed she was gone, like Pine Sap, or Tik Tok, would assume she was avoiding Giant.
I fell into the habit of looking after the boys. What else could I do? Curly had long since lost interest in smushing me, so I got bored of simply flicking my earwax into his food or hiding briars near the groin of his leggings. I started to clean up after them as much as I could. I moved the littl
e knickknacks they left lying around to places where they’d be easiest to find and use. I joined in when they chased each other, though no one ever noticed when I caught them, landing on their shoulders. Still, it was intoxicating to imagine being a part of their lives, even if they didn’t think of me that way.
I watched Tiger Lily eat with the boys, sloppy and greedy, until they all had stomachaches. It wasn’t unheard of for Tootles to eat until he vomited. She covered herself in leaves like they did to take after-dinner naps, emerging with a muddy, dirty smell that she always had to wash off at the seaside before she went home. One evening I heard a foreign sound, like a boar choking, and discovered it was the sound of Tiger Lily’s laugh. From then on, Tootles made her laugh often, breathlessly, something I had never seen in all my years of watching her. Nibs, inquisitive but never pushy, could make her soften and almost open up about herself. She told him about Tik Tok, and together they wondered about what had ever happened to her parents. With the boys, she liked to sit with her legs splayed boy-style as they did while they ate or lounged, and no one seemed to notice or care. I suspected she was an inch away from running around with her shirt off too.
Simply put, she ran wild. Or that’s what the tribe would have called it. She wrestled with the boys like a monkey. She didn’t always win, but she could hold her own. There were many things she could do better than them: she had better aim than everyone but Peter, she could run faster, but they didn’t seem to mind. And she didn’t seem to mind when the boys touched her—hugged her or tackled her or punched her in the arm—though for years I’d seen her let few people so much as pat her shoulder. She didn’t mind when they ruffled her braids or poked at her two crow feathers, even when Curly liked to steal one and stick it up his nostril. “You seem to be missing your feather,” he’d lisp to her through the feather hanging out of his nose and down over his lips, as if it weren’t there.
It wasn’t that they didn’t treat her like a girl. I knew from my previous visits to them that they always tried to be better when she was around, always let her eat first. But they tormented her too, like they constantly tormented each other. And as far as I could tell, she loved it.
Every night, she crossed the bridge over the crocs, and it began to feel familiar and safe. Her nose was more sensitive. Her senses felt sharper than ever. I kept an eye out for watching eyes, and saw nothing. I told myself that if Smee were watching, one of us would have known it. But the forest was deep and thick, and sometimes I wondered if even Tiger Lily was sharp enough to notice everything.
When she could get away during daylight, they brought her on hunts. The lost boys went about hunting a whole different way than the Sky Eaters did. They stopped often: to lie in a meadow, to pick berries, to fling dead stuff at each other or wade in creeks. They meandered. They argued and fought. Especially Slightly and Nibs, or Slightly and anyone.
Sometimes Peter treated her like she was the only thing in the forest. Sometimes he was so distracted by the things around him that she had to keep up or be left behind. But a lot of times, she knew he did it on purpose, and she didn’t know why. He seemed to have reasons for doing things even he didn’t understand.
How can I describe Peter’s face, the pieces of him that stick to my heart? Peter sometimes looked aloof and distant; sometimes his face was open and soft as a bruise. Sometimes he looked completely at Tiger Lily, as if she were the point on which all the universe revolved, as if she were the biggest mystery of life, or as if she were a flame and he couldn’t not look even though he was scared. And sometimes it would all disappear into carelessness, confidence, amusement, as if he didn’t need anyone or anything on this earth to feel happy and alive.
Peter in the creek was dazzling. He could hold his hand so still in the water that fish would swim right into it; he almost seemed to talk them into his hands. He showed her how to do it, as he would have with any of the other boys; he simply seemed to take it as his duty to teach her. He could climb anything—even, it seemed, sheer rock: he’d find the invisible places where his toes would fit. He knew how to emulate the call of the howler monkeys perfectly. Where the boys all watched for snakes and scorpions under their feet, Peter didn’t slow a bit, nor did Tiger Lily when she was stubbornly keeping pace with him. He never seemed to think over a decision, but merely plowed ahead, and somehow the earth always caught him in her soft hands. No one thought of doubting him.
But, most dazzling of all, he was weak around Tiger Lily. I realized this one afternoon when he was watching her eat red berries they had picked at a favorite patch of bushes beyond the edge of the territory. The red berry stains on her lips seemed to practically torture him with their beauty. When he sat beside her, aching to be close to her, she smushed some berries onto his face, almost shyly. He tackled her around the waist and she rested her chin on his shoulder tentatively, and he nervously touched her face and traced it. It was like this sometimes, and I felt I should look away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be there, having my face touched, defeating a heart like Peter’s, but the next best thing was seeing it for Tiger Lily. Peter would grow helpless. He watched her with Baby when she thought no one was looking—she’d poke the baby curiously, and stare at him with fascination and a little fear. Peter spied on her at the village taking care of Tik Tok. He liked to watch her run. And always, I could see that, despite his weakness for her or because of it, he seemed uncatchable, as if he might slip away at any moment.
An unspoken rivalry threaded their relationship, in which Tiger Lily thought that if she could keep up with him, she could hold tighter to him. It didn’t occur to her there was anything in which Peter wanted her to fail. But sometimes I could see that, even for him, she was too fast, too sure-footed, and didn’t seem to need him quite enough.
And sometimes, when it was quiet and the boys had wandered off somewhere, he’d pull her close, as if he was about to say something, and they’d kiss each other. I would always look away, longing and sad and caught up in their happiness all at once.
Peter was working on a wooden flute for Tootles one night in the burrow. He was increasingly frustrated with the wood in his hands. It was obvious he wanted to finish it, but he hated sitting still. And the work looked painstaking.
“He won’t finish it,” Slightly whispered to her. “He never finishes anything.” He shook his head, long-suffering and annoyed. “Trust me. Anything.”
I was carrying different tools to Peter, hoping they might help. Every once in a while he’d look up and say, “Thanks, Tink,” focusing on me for a joyful moment. I treasured these seconds when Peter acknowledged me, and I tried to seek out other things he might need or want, in order to get more of his momentary glances.
“Did you notice life has gotten better?” Tootles asked, out loud, to anyone.
“It’s Tiger Lily,” Slightly said, as if Tootles was being an idiot. They didn’t say anything about me, but I decided to believe they meant both of us. “Life’s better with girls. Boys need girls. That’s why things are so boring in the burrow.”
“You should move in with us,” Nibs said to Tiger Lily.
Tootles snaked his hand behind her elbow and leaned against her, innocently and thoughtlessly, but when Peter’s eyes darted to his fingers, Tootles let go, then just patted her on the shoulder.
“I want to see buildings sometimes,” Curly said, out of the blue.
“I dream of living in a house. And girls,” Slightly said, then added solemnly, “and also … did I mention girls?”
“Shut up.” Peter stood suddenly; let out a loud, angry sigh; and stalked off. As predicted, he left the unfinished flute behind.
Then he came back, shoulders stooping. “I’m sorry,” he said, to the ground. Then walked out again.
“It must be you,” Nibs whispered to Tiger Lily, who sat erect against the burrow wall, uncomfortable. “He never comes back and apologizes.”
Tootles picked up the pieces of his abandoned flute.
One morning at home, Tik
Tok had Tiger Lily try on her wedding dress. He seemed disappointed that it fit so well. Despite their expectations, it became her. Its simplicity and sleekness were subtle enough to highlight her strong, high cheeks, the shine of her hair. It was a dress made by someone who knew her. It was her freedom and her silence sewn into a dress.
She hated what it meant. But she loved the dress because it was from Tik Tok’s hands and because it made her feel like herself. She took it off.
At night, Tiger Lily tossed and turned, feeling like Peter was beside her all the time.
TWENTY-TWO
Phillip surrounded the villagers with stories, and whether they were make-believe or not, the people of the village wanted them to be true, because they were hungry for someone to tell them the way things were outside. He enraptured them with talk of England, and mapping the world, but mostly what they wanted to hear about was heaven, and they argued late into the night with each other about what it looked like and what and who was there. They began saying their prayers. I could hear them at it, their thoughts lifting up above the rooftops, promising God they loved him best, which Phillip said was important, though they muttered, in whispers so that God wouldn’t hear, that it seemed God must be unsure of himself to need so much reassurance. Still, Phillip said God could see them all the time, so they were careful.
Almost no villager, in those days, liked to start their day without going to listen to Phillip tell his stories after breakfast. The women came and embroidered and shucked corn as he talked, and the men stood respectfully and absorbed his words before going off to hunt. Pine Sap was one of the exceptions. He came to listen once, early on, and then chose to go into the woods instead whenever Phillip was giving his talks.