Neverworld Wake Read online

  All of us grew silent and sullen as we listened. The violence at the Warwick police station had brought us all together, opened up the roped-off rooms in the sprawling, lavish mansion that had once been our friendship, flung the sheets off the furniture, turned on the lights. Now it seemed Martha’s disclosure had us taking refuge in our separate rooms again, disappearing up winding staircases, holing up behind closed doors, the only hint of company an occasional creak of the floorboards overhead.

  I didn’t know what they worried about. They chose not to confide in me or, it seemed, in each other.

  My own anxiety had everything to do with Martha. Those bombshells she’d dropped—J. C. Gossamer Madwick, the physical laws of the Neverworld being tied to each of us—had prompted me to scrutinize her every knowing glance and comment even more closely than I had before. To my shock, I realized that somewhere in the time since I’d found her at Brown with Professor Beloroda, she’d managed to quietly seize control of the entire group. For years, her status had been peripheral. She was the tagalong sidekick, Jim’s friend, the oddball you could count on to react to PETA commercials with some jarringly cynical comment like “Such propaganda,” or, when any couple ended up together at the end of a romantic comedy, “Another horror movie with a high body count.” Martha had always made us roll our eyes and chuckle. Now, incredibly, impossibly, she was the one the others looked to for guidance, for expertise and reassurance. A few times I tried confiding in Kip, Whitley, and Cannon, hinting that I didn’t trust Martha or this new direction she was urging us toward. They didn’t share my suspicion.

  “What do you mean, she’s up to something?” Kipling asked me, frowning.

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

  “But it’s good old Martha. Rain Man. She’s not conniving. She’s too honest and goofy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m serious. She knows more than she’s letting on.”

  “Does it really matter?” whispered Kipling. “What else can we do, Bee? I don’t know about you, but I need something to change. Anything. Even if it means…”

  “Even if it means what?”

  He shrugged, his expression bleak, the meaning behind his unfinished sentence obvious.

  Even if it means we never get out of here.

  * * *

  —

  Our evenings passed in heated discussions about how to change the wake and get to the Masons.

  In The Bend, Jonathan Elster discovers time travel accidentally when following in the footsteps of the missing professor Anastasia Bent, who the police believe committed suicide by jumping off a seaside cliff. As Jonathan follows suit, jumping from the exact spot where Professor Bent was last seen, plummeting a hundred feet toward certain death, he finds himself crashing not into the rocky cliffs, but into the Thames in London in the year 2122.

  “The open train compartment window for time travel always exists on the verge of death,” said Martha, “which is why so few people ever find it. You have to think you’re facing your death in order to reach it. So how do we find it here, in the Neverworld? I know I already asked you guys this, but have any of you ever tried to commit suicide?”

  Again, we all shook our heads.

  Martha seemed perplexed by this response, though she only nibbled a thumbnail thoughtfully, saying nothing more.

  Another critical fact to remember was that for everyone to arrive at the right place and time—the same train compartment in the past or the future—we had to make sure it was the final thought in our heads right before the moment on the verge of death.

  “We’ll aim for Villa Anna Sophia on Amorgos Island one day in the past,” Martha announced. “Yesterday. August twenty-ninth. That’s where we’ll start.”

  “Why the past and not the future?” asked Cannon.

  “You never know what tomorrow will bring. The future could hold a natural disaster, terrorist attack, alien invasion. The past has already happened, so we know what to expect.”

  “But if we’re going into the past,” I asked, “why not just go straight to Vulcan Quarry on the night Jim died? Then we’ll know everything.”

  “She’s right,” said Cannon.

  “No,” said Martha, shaking her head. “No way. We’re not ready. In The Bend, the train gets shorter and shorter with each leap in time. That means our wakes will get shorter. It’ll cause too much instability. It could mean we won’t have enough time to come to vote with a consensus. We have to start out slowly.”

  I didn’t buy her explanation—she seemed too quick to condemn my suggestion—but the others appeared to accept her answer. So I decided not to challenge her. Not yet.

  No one had been to Amorgos except me. Only I had visited Jim that summer. So the others could vividly envision the time and place, I showed them photos from the trip on my phone and told them what I remembered: The island’s scalding brightness. The open-air Jeeps the Mason family drove around the island, tearing down the dirt roads like an occupying army. Edgar Mason, shut away at all hours in his space-age office, from which he’d abruptly emerge like Zeus coming down from Olympus (if Zeus was tanned to the color of whiskey, had spiky hedgehog hair, and rose every day at four a.m. to practice Ashtanga yoga while whispering into an earpiece). Jim’s younger siblings and their respective friends stampeding up and down the house’s staircases like herds of antelope. Jim had two younger twin sisters, Gloriana and Florence, and two adopted brothers from Uganda, Cal and Niles. Much to my amazement, they had a Swahili tutor living with them (“A cultural attaché,” Jim said). Jim and I had spent most of our time alone, reading aloud from John Lennon biographies, diving off the dock, exploring the coastline in a blue skiff called Little Bird. We snorkeled and ate grilled fish doused with lemon that squirted into my eyes and stung. We fed dinner rolls to the packs of wild dogs that patrolled the night streets like gangs, and stayed up into the early morning at drunken family feasts at gangplank tables under a blue night sky, chains of yellow paper lanterns bobbing overhead.

  Though Jim had invited me to spend the entire summer with him, my parents only agreed to let me visit for five days. To get them to agree to even that took State Department levels of persuasion. Those five days passed in the blink of an eye, each tinged with a blinding, far-fetched sheen, which made me feel at once uncomfortable and bewitched. Jim’s world was so vivid, so improbable. As suddenly as I was thrown into it, I was tossed out, marooned back in sleepy Watch Hill, distracted and gloomy as I worked alongside my parents at the Crow, leaving milk shakes too long in the mixer, preparing egg salad sandwiches for customers who’d ordered turkey and Swiss. I was haunted, like Wendy by memories of Neverland and Peter Pan. I spent the rest of the summer tabulating in my head the seven-hour time difference so I could picture what Jim was doing, and roared through the house like a caged lion tossed a fresh carcass to seize the phone in time whenever he called.

  Per Martha’s instructions, I described as best I could a single room in the house: the main living room, with its dreamy gauze curtains, whitewashed furniture, and scalding view of the Aegean. This was so they could feel as if they’d been there too, could have it be the very last thought in their heads before the moment on the verge of death—whatever that turned out to be.

  * * *

  —

  When the five of us weren’t holed up in the library hashing over The Bend, I’d grab an umbrella and head into the storm, hiking the property alone.

  As I walked I could hear Martha’s voice in my head, her unnerving whisper: Your contribution is here. Somewhere.

  It was during one of these solitary walks when, heading down the narrow stairs to the dock, I noticed the trees writhing with an intensity that wasn’t normal. The ocean was rough, whitecaps licking the inky water. The sailboats moored far out in the cove clattered and bobbed. Ropes had com
e loose from the masts, thrashing like snakes. A buoy clanged somewhere out on the ocean, the sound mournful, deathly.

  Suddenly I heard a woman’s sharp scream.

  The moan of the wind made me think I’d imagined it.

  Then I heard another cry. This time it was a man.

  Two people were arguing. Sensing that the voices were coming from behind me, I closed my umbrella and hurried off the dock and out of sight, darting into the foot-wide space between the bank and wooden steps.

  Moments later, I heard them again. I realized they weren’t coming from Wincroft at all, but from one of the sailboats out in the harbor. Dark figures were moving along the deck of one anchored close to the dock of the property next door.

  Andiamo, it was called.

  I remembered hearing Whitley mention it belonged to E.S.S. Burt. A tiny gold light was shining from the bow.

  Then it came: another scream.

  I waited. Minutes later, I heard a motor. A skiff was approaching. Peering through the steps, I saw Whitley. She was alone. She docked the boat, hastily knotting the ropes before climbing onto the pier, running up the steps. Her face caught the light as she barreled right past my head. She looked angry.

  I waited. When there were no further voices, I headed back to the house. I knocked once on the library doors, and opening them, I saw Whitley, soaking wet, sitting with Martha on the couch. They jolted upright as soon as I entered, startled looks on their faces. My first thought was of two teenagers surreptitiously smoking pot in a living room, suddenly interrupted by a parent.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” said Whitley.

  Martha smiled. “Could you give us a minute, Bee?”

  I stared at Whitley. Never had she preferred to confide in Martha over me. Never. Hadn’t our friendship come back to life after all this time in the Neverworld? Weren’t we friends again? But she only stared back at me, sullen.

  I left with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, closing the door.

  Almost immediately I could hear Whitley, her voice low and muffled, her words indistinguishable.

  What the hell is going on?

  I headed upstairs. Searching the bedrooms, I found no sign of Cannon, or Kipling either, which seemed to suggest they’d been aboard the boat too. Had they held some kind of secret meeting purposely behind my back? Why? What were they doing? I grabbed the umbrella, headed back outside, and hiked down to the dock.

  There was no obvious movement on the sailboat and there were no more voices.

  I stayed there for another hour, watching. When nothing happened, I decided to hike back to Wincroft, and as I hurried up the path I noticed the Keeper.

  Immediately my throat constricted. The last time I’d seen him had been in the woods at Darrow. He seemed to have vanished for a time. Now he was back, a dark figure in a black raincoat, hunched over, drenched. He was digging with great exertion, his whole body contorting with each fling of dirt.

  I veered off the stone path to avoid him and sprinted through the trees. When I reached the house, I couldn’t help turning back to look at him.

  He hadn’t noticed me. He was still digging what I now realized were four muddy holes in the earth. Four graves.

  But that wasn’t the strangest thing.

  He was wearing the black glasses of a blind man.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t have time to ruminate on what the Keeper had been doing, or what it meant, because the very next wake the answer to the mystery of the sailboat argument and Whitley’s private conversation with Martha came to light.

  “Kipling has something to tell us,” announced Martha as we all assembled in the library. “Whitley brought this to my attention late last wake, and I think it could help us.”

  “You didn’t,” Cannon said angrily to Whitley.

  “I had to,” she answered.

  He glared at her, livid.

  “Oh, please. Stop the policeman act. You want to get out of here, don’t you? I mean, don’t you want to find out what really happened to Jim?”

  “It wasn’t your secret to tell,” he hissed.

  “If it affects our ability to change the wake, it is.”

  “It’s all right,” said Martha, placing a hand on Cannon’s shoulder. “You can tell us.”

  That was when I noticed Kipling. He was crying. Truly crying, in a way I’d never seen him before—the kind of crying that was more of a wringing out than normal tears. He was seated on the couch, head in his hands, tears streaming down his chin.

  “I call it the Black-Footed Sioux Carpet,” he blurted suddenly, staring at the floor. “It’s a form of self-harm. ‘An unsuitable attempt to solve interpersonal difficulties.’ That’s what the shrinks all call it. Momma Greer invented it. She coined the term from some crazy-lookin’ rug she’d filched from an antiques store. We did it together. Mother-son bondin’. Sometimes we did it multiple times a week. She’d drive me out to a country road on a Friday night when she decided there was nothing good on TV. The first time I was five. We’d lie down in the road side by side, holdin’ hands, waiting for a car. ‘Roll out of the way when I say bingo,’ she told me. ‘We’ll see how much God likes us. If he wants us to live. Cuz I’ll only say bingo if God tells me to. That’s the deal.’ ” Kipling shuddered. “I pissed myself I was so scared. I hadn’t said my prayers. Good God. I mean, did God even know I existed? Did He like me? He couldn’t like me that much if He’d given me this face to go through life with. This body. I’d squeeze Momma Greer’s hand. She was my lifeline. Then the car. You always felt it first in the pavement underneath you. It’d take Momma Greer a year to yell bingo. But it always came. I’d squeeze my eyes shut and roll out of the way. The tires would miss me by centimeters. By the time I opened my eyes Momma Greer would be up dancin’ on the side of the road, whooping and hollerin’, yankin’ off all her clothes. ‘See that? God loves us. He loves us after all.’ She was always in a good mood after that. If I was lucky, it lasted a whole week.”

  He fell silent a moment, rubbing his eyes. I could only stare. While I had known Momma Greer was dangerous, this was by far the most terrifying thing I’d ever heard she’d done.

  “It became an addiction,” Kipling went on. “The rush of it. I never stopped. Every few months, whenever things got out of hand or hopeless, I’d find a way to do my Black-Footed Sioux Carpet. I’d sneak off campus. Immediately felt better. I did a big one junior year, right before Christmas break, when Rector Trask told me I couldn’t return next semester. I was kicked out. I was the sort of student—how did he put it?—who needed an environment with ‘less vigorous expectations.’ Like, he thought I’d do better in Sing-Sing. My Black-Footed Sioux Carpet after that nearly got me made into an egg-scramble sandwich by a Folger’s truck.” He glanced up, sniffing. “It certainly would have given new meanin’ to their slogan ‘The Best Part of Wakin’ Up.’ ”

  I gazed at him, speechless. Kipling had always been a rotten student. While I knew there had been cliffhangers at the end of every school year as to whether he was passing, I’d never known he was actually kicked out. His poor academic record had changed senior year, when he managed to focus on his studies. By the time we graduated, he had done well.

  “It was Cannon who saved me,” Kip said with a faint smile. “He saw what I was tryin’ so hard to hide.”

  “You weren’t that good at hiding it,” said Cannon, grinning. “You were walking with a limp and winced when you sat down.”

  Kipling looked at me. “Remember how I missed two months of school due to a ‘family emergency’?”

  I nodded. Vaguely I remembered him telling me a vibrant and long-winded story about his aunt’s heart condition.

  “It was all lies. I was at a treatment center in Providence, doin’ tai chi, watercolorin’ fruit b
owls, and developin’ a middle path to manage my unrestrained patterns of thought. It was Cannon who checked me in. Cannon who came during visitin’ hours. Coordinated with the shrinks on my progress. Lobbied Darrow to give me one last chance. He helped turn my grades around. Got my college applications ready. Sat up with me all night helpin’ write my essay about Momma Greer. ‘Mommy Bipolar.’ Otherwise known as ‘How to Survive in the Custody of a Complete Lunatic.’ That got me into Louisiana State. I’d be encrusted right now in the front tire treads of a UPS truck if it weren’t for Cannon.”

  My mind was spinning. I thought back to senior year, and though I recalled Cannon as always quite busy, coming and going abruptly with his backpack and an armful of textbooks, never had I suspected what he was up to. But it made sense. He was the silent problem solver. “The steady trickle of water that always finds a passage,” Whitley used to say. Still, I felt hurt that they hadn’t wanted to confide in me, that there had been an entire history happening right before my eyes about which I’d had no clue.

  “Why did you never say anything?” I asked Kipling.

  He glanced at Cannon, and I saw pass wordlessly between them some fleeting shadow of understanding that was gone almost as soon as I recognized it.

  Kipling shrugged. “There comes a point where your personal pile of crazy gets to be a bit much. Even for your best friends.”

  “That’s not quite the whole truth,” prompted Whitley expectantly, tilting her head.

  Kipling looked sheepish. “Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat. “My eleventh-hour streak of Cs and Bs, revealin’ me to be a decent student who’d only been pretendin’ all that time to be abysmal? That wasn’t real.”