She does not remember how she ended up in her backyard. But the screen door is banging on its stubborn hinges, she is swaying aimlessly on the ancient wooden swing and he is there. She studies the man, who is perched on the tire swing adjacent to her. His thick muscles, like raw cuts of meat, diverge from his cherub features. Tufts of white gold hair dispersed with random, frizzed coils lingers at the peripheries of his face, accentuating his gray white whiskers, patchy across the angles of his defined jaw. Mischievous and fidgety, his manner is that of a child.
Dandelion seeds float through the air and stick to her cotton skirt. Peter is occupied with clapping the fluff between his palms. Wendy turns her face to the lukewarm sun that sits in the sky directly above her, so she knows it’s about noon; she liked these days where the orange ball melts the morning into the afternoon. The slap of his palms is replaced by the wind in her ears and she looks in Peter’s direction to see what he’s up to. Slender, sinewy legs stretched in front of him, he sits a cross from her on the ground. She swings forward, extending her calves engulfed by the swelling fabric. He wiggles his toes, the soles of his feet with blotches of stains from mud and grass. She wiggles hers back; her own curved feet knotted at joints. Her creased skin stretches with every movement, like paper mache over a wire frame. She rocks back and forth between the balls of her feet and heels.
They’ve been silent for some time, but he relocates to the tire swing. The tree branches creak under their weight and he begins to sway. She does the same. Peter taps his big toe on the torso of his shadow each time he swings forward. She glances at him, her white hair spilling over her bare shoulder. He catches her glance and halts mid swing, one heel to the ground, skidding to a stop. They hold their stares, frozen in a still frame but she can’t maintain it. Pulling up grass with her toes, she shifts her eyes to her feet.
“I can make you fly.” He taunts her. He hasn’t changed
Wendy’s eyes widen, then crinkle at the corners, narrowing into opal crescents behind her glass lenses. Her eyebrows and lashes are silver and fine and the skin of her forehead is like aged newspaper against her stark white hair. She doesn’t turn to address him.
“I told you, things are diff-,” but he does not let her finish.
“I’ll push you.” He nudges his fuzzy chin in the direction of her swing and she wonders what it would feel like against her forehead, or cheek, or eyelids. Her cheeks flush, blotchy. She examines her hands, folded in her lap. He slides through the opening of the tire swing and she grips the two ropes a bit tighter with her soft claylike fingers. Peter pushes the corners of the chipped wooden seat, his russet hand next to her skin that always reminds her of the inside of a shell. She sways back and forth a few times before he gives her another push, his forearms tensing, stretching the slack skin over his muscles. The apprehension in her stomach lessens and she churns the air with her legs on her way up, the skirt clinging to them on her way back, edges rippling just above her ankles.
His hair wafts like behind her from the slightest puff of air each time she returns from being high above the ground. He catches her on each wrist, and she notices his large hands could encircle them twice. The abrupt stop startles her with a nip at her temples. That always seemed to happen, like a minor electric shock.
“We could really fly.” Peter has to lean down, his scruffy face like brush bristles on her earlobe, breath like steam from a kettle. The nip turns into a dull ache at her temples, her heart pulsing in her head. Wendy’s back tenses, the sheer fabric of her lace shirt stretching a cross her shoulder blades. Her mouth is dry.
“No…we can’t.” She doesn’t turn to face him but rests her chin on her shoulder. Wendy doesn’t know if she can fall back into the whirlpool he pulled her into before. But she feels like the girl she was long ago. The one who was stuck between two places, being yanked into both directions, threatening to tear at the seams.
Peter pulls back on the seat of the swing as far as his arms let him and she hangs there for a moment, legs dangling. He releases her. Wendy had forgotten how much she loved skimming the air. She leaned back into the momentum of it, letting strands of her hair, like spider webs catch on the blades of grass. Back and forth, back and forth his sea glass eyes follow her. They slow as she slows. He stares at her in the way that making her squirm. It is happening again, that stirring she got when she tried to give Peter the thimble. She wants him to know what she’s feeling. No, she wants him to feel what she’s feeling. But nothing could predict whether he would understand or not. And if he does understand and doesn’t accept it, Wendy feared the outcome would be similar to Tinkerbelle’s, except no one would be there to clap for her.
Wendy begins pumping her legs steadily, prodding off the earth with her right foot. She watches for his reaction. His lips quiver then curve into a smile that almost isn’t there. But it is. She almost wants to tell him not to laugh just so he would. He studies his shadow.
“Why did we grow up, Wendy?” This time he does not look at her but touches the elongated silhouette of her legs with the toe of his other foot.
Wendy does not stop, nor respond, but pumps her legs more swiftly. She had to get higher, have the sky swallow her.
“I don’t know. But I already had begun when you found me. And I think you had too.” She can’t make herself look at him. When she is able to, his expression stirs, like a few burnt out bulbs on a string of lights, something amiss. It is the first time since his return that he looks his age; reddish, sagging eyes, tired, drooping skin, hunched spine. He opens his mouth but is muted. She swings higher still, focused on flying on her own, without him.
“I can beat you,” he challenges. She feels her eyes dart to where he is standing, leaned up again the trunk of the tree, broad, like his shoulders. Why did he always make everything a competition? It was so childish. Peter, she realized, is unaware of the fact that he has grown up just like her. A hint of annoyance pokes at her side. She feels as if she cannot not trust herself with him, as if she’s moving backwards, becoming younger. “Did you hear me Wendy? I said I’m going to win!”
She lets her legs hang for a moment, freefalls from her upward swing, and studies Peter. Kick starting off the carpet of grass once again, driving her legs forward, rapidly this time she fixes her gaze towards the blue composition of the sky and clouds. She never declined a challenge. He tugs at the waist of his brown linen shorts snug around his hips, preparing, thrusting his arms back, crouching. He was incredibly predictable, cheating to win. It could be that he knew he had grown up, but just didn’t care. She calls down to him.
“No cheating! We are going to do this my way.” The boy does not protest her demand, but mounts the swing beside her and beings to pump his legs like hers. She is ahead but he propels his legs more rapidly and closes in. He has the same energy she did so long ago. This perplexes her; He is wrinkled like wet paper towels yet he has vigor, bulging limbs, a ruddy forehead and nose, and cocky sarcasm; an adolescent jostling him from the inside.
He is back while she is forth, her long stems pump twice, out and under, out and under, for his one pump, out and under. Wendy does this with her granddaughter too, compares the size of limbs, and fingers and ears to hers. Now Peter, the boy who is never supposed to grow up, has in once sense, and she marvels at the largeness of his body as if she could completely engulf her. He catches up, but Wendy pulls ahead. She wants to fly and feel the wind under her arms and in the spaces of her fingers. She frees the swing of her hands, gradually spreading her arms out beyond the confines of the ropes, keeping her poise. She soars, her eyes closed. Wisps of hair swirl around her face and catch in the corners of her mouth. Her fingers twiddle in the air, wrists flexing and straightening. She keeps her eyes closed except for two slivers that let just enough light in to make out a few shapes to the world outside her eyelids.
Peter levitates from the seat of his swing. She can see a blurry shape drifting through the air, as if someone spilled water on a painting. He approaches her, pausing just in front of the swing, close enough to collide with her as she pitches forward. But Wendy knows better. He floats back just enough before she becomes too close. He hovers, taking her in. Her eyes are shut to the world. Just before she slows to a stop he poises himself just above her lap, toes barely grazing the tips of her knees.
“I don’t think we ever grew up. Not completely.” Slow motion sets in, the rise and fall of her chest, her toes scrunching the grass, the breeze, heavy on her shoulders, and her muscles stiffen as it settles in. He may be right. But something else sighs in her ear that she is not wrong. Removing her glasses, she inspects the lenses and wipes them with the scalloped edge of her skirt. She looks at the thin metal frames between her fingers as Peter floats downward so she is nearly inches from his sea glass eyes. Wendy places the glasses on his face. They teeter for a moment but she balances them on his nose. “Does the world seem any different?” she questions. The woman glances just beyond his shoulder. The glasses catch the sun and rays of needle thin light radiates over her neck, cheeks and forehead. He is shaking his head reluctantly, the sun hides behind a cloud and the kaleidoscope light disappears.
She draws the flimsy frames from the bridge of his nose and flips them so the sides hook back behind her ears. Pausing, she nudges the glasses up onto the top of her head, pushing some of the thick tendrils back from her brow. Wendy takes a deep, shaken breath before she can speak, “But things are different. My life is different. I am different.” Wendy noticed a slight edge to her voice that was not there before and begins swaying again, slower, less rhythmic, to and fro, left to right, swiveling. “You can’t show up after all of this time and expect me to be ecstatic to see you. You left me waiting every year since I went to Neverland with you. You promised to come back and you never did. Not once. Now you are hear and you’re…this…” she sweeps her hand up and down through the air, motioning to his grown body. She fidgets with her feet in hopes to let the subject drop. He loses his balance on her knees and ascends. “Just because nothing has changed for you does not mean the same for me.” She kicks off the ground more forcefully with every few words. Frustration ferments inside of her. Why had he returned now so close to the end of her life? Decades she has waited for him and he left her abandon with a smeared face and hot cheeks. Wendy can still remember grabbing the fist full of sewing tools and throwing them into the special drawer, yanking the key from around her neck and flinging it in after. A red streak had remained on the skin where the string was ripped from around it.
Her swing jerks her from the past, leaves shutter, and she looks up to find him straddling a branch.
“Right. You grow up, go to school, get a job, and responsibilities. Then bad…things…happen, Wendy.” She notices eeriness in his tone. Peter plucks a few leaves from the branch and lets them pirouette downward. One lands in Wendy’s hair. Its vibrant orange contours resemble painted streaks on a canvas of her hair. The pressure building up inside of her threatens implode. She can’t make him understand.
“That’s right, bad things happen, and you learn, grow, and change. You are the boring one Peter. You want to be the same forever.” She’s cautious. “But you can’t be the same forever. You’re changing too. Remember when I told you about fear?” Familiarity sputters over his face. “And sadness?” He turns away from her and drops his head. “You felt those emotions, and you questioned them. That means you were changing because they were new to you. You were growing and you still are. And so am I.” He peeks at her over his shoulder, his smooth back curving and wrinkling. “You should have come with me. We should have grown together.” Her voice is a murmur, nearly lost in the hiss of blowing leaves in the trees around them. His eyes twitch as he bites his lip and he looks like a little boy once again.
His cherub face now reveals deflated cheeks and lips bent into a scribble of a frown. His eyes are unblinking on his depressed brow.
“You don’t mean that.” But he doesn’t yell. She sits up a bit straighter, pulling the leaf from her nest of loose curls, twisting to face the tree he is settled in.
“No, you wish I didn’t mean it. But somewhere in that callow soul of yours, you know I’m right. You wish you did as well more than that you wish that I didn’t mean it.” The woman twirls the leaf’s stem between her pinched fingers. The current picks up, mussing her hair upward, into knots. She holds the leaf out in front of her. Letting go it’s carried upward towards him. He seizes it in his fist, folding its edges inward like origami paper. His face mimics its crumbled shape. Neither speaks but Peter, now gazing up into the canopy of leaves, sniffs, swipes the back of his hand across his nose and stubbly cheek and begins climbing upward.
“I can climb like a normal boy!” he mocks as he climbs. His voice is choked, dense like fog. She pivots more and looks up, shading her eyes with her hand, but remains sitting. Wendy’s heart picks up speed as he climbs higher, his movement becoming less fluid and more erratic, jerking the branches. She bobs on her swing. And then it’s silent and she sees his face peek down through a cluster of leaves. His face of dirty rivers, swollen lips and a flooded nose, coating his beard, stringy in places. “But I’d rather fly!” Wendy startles backward almost falling off her swing. She’d never heard Peter yell before. She’d never seen him angry before. It terrified her. And then she realized what he was about to do. But before she could scream a plead up to him, the branches creak suddenly and the leaves tremble. She wobbles violently on her swing.
Wendy knows he can fly and she prays that he will. But she can feel her face pinch with helplessness as he begins to plummet, his useless arms thrashing, a rectangular blur in the air. His usual streamlined form is replaced by a tumbling mass, a bird caught in a line of fire. Wendy feels as if she’s watching it happen on fast-forward, except his face is perfectly clear. His eyes seem to take up his entire forehead, pleading with her in sadness, with terror, in confusion. Then, a blur of color, a thud, a crack, like eggs against cement and the woman startles and turns slowly to face the source. Her eyes make a fleeting search, the rest of her body stagnant. They land on the patch of grass just beyond the swing she occupied. Gathering her skirt in her fists she trips on the material, and attempts to trot to the spot where the he in a heap of unnatural angles.
He doesn’t move. His hair wafts from the jolts of air that blow past. The woman reaches him, lowering herself down to his motionless body. Her skirt mushrooms, enveloping both of them. She hovers over him, her hands trembling above his brawny frame, her eyes flitting back and forth, wide, wet. With one arm slid beneath him, the other draped across his shuttering chest, she struggles to turn him over, brushing his matted hair off of his forehead. Her nose leaks, dripping on to his forehead, she wipes it with her thumb leaving a dirty streak. Scooping his torso awkwardly into her lap, she can’t think of what to do but cradle him like a rag doll. He doesn’t move, but wheezes, a faulty engine. The woman rocks back and on her knees, nestling him, humming into his ear.
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