Neverland (17 page)

Sumter was working hard to keep back tears in his eyes, which made them even shinier and more hateful than before. “It was only
pretend
,” he said to me. “You
liked
it when it was with Zinnia. Well, it’s all the same,
you like it once, you gotta keep on liking it, Beau, because it
ain’t never, never gonna go away no more
. I’m gonna let it out when I want, hear?”

That night I could not sleep. I sat up reading
The Martian Chronicles
and wished I was on Mars even though horrible things seemed to be happening there. I had a flashlight under the sheet so that anyone passing in the hallway wouldn’t see any light under my door. It was hard to breathe, and I was sweating like a pig, but the world of that book cooled me off some—until the pages began falling out and distracted me. Sometime after midnight, when the house was quiet, I got up and went to use the bathroom. I heard the scraping of Grammy Weenie’s wheelchair coming from just below me, down in the hallway.

I froze.

She was muttering to herself as she wheeled into the light on the stairs. She stopped there, and her profile reminded me of someone. Her hair was down around her shoulders and was as white as the farthest stars seem on the blackest night. She was brushing her hair with her silver-backed natural-bristle brush. I had never seen her hair unbraided before, and it made her look young because it was so long and thick. If I squinted I could see her as she must’ve been before I was born: so beautiful, and so distant and cold. Neither my mother nor my aunt had quite inherited those looks, but I saw someone there in that face. Someone I had never seen before there. Sumter. He had inherited the masculine version of those looks, and both had the white hair.

Suddenly Grammy Weenie dropped the brush to her lap and reached with her hands to wheel around and glance up the staircase. I ducked down low by the banister at the top of the stairs but knew she couldn’t see me, both because of her bad eyesight and the stair light shining on her face.

Grammy Weenie whispered, “Is it you? Are you coming for me now? Come out, then, come out and we’ll see what can be done about this.”

I was afraid she was talking to me, but her eyes were fixed on another point on the stairs.

There, sitting propped up and off to the side, was Sumter’s teddy bear.

Grammy Weenie whispered, “Fine, then. Make it go back to that special place I showed you. Make it stop. Good. It’s important to have a place to go to, somewhere you can keep things to yourself.”

For the next twenty-four hours Sumter would not speak to me. I couldn’t figure out what it was that I was supposed to have done. If I tried to say anything to him, he’d reply through his bear.

“Sumter?”

He’d whisper in Bernard’s ear: “Tell my cousin to go away.”

“C’mon, don’t be such a baby.”

To Bernard he’d say, “Tell him I have more important things to think about.”

I moped around that Saturday, not interested in watching television or going down to the beach with my sisters and Julianne Sanders, who warned me that my face would freeze in a pout if I didn’t try smiling.

The grown-ups went to the market, although Grammy Weenie was around to watch Sumter and me. She just sat in her chair with her big rectangular magnifying glass she used for reading and pored over the Book of Revelations, another of her biblical favorites.

She loved reading aloud about the Beast of the Apocalypse and the Horsemen.

“Every day of our lives we see the Beast,” she said, “and every day we must face our Creator and the fires that do not cease.”

Certain times I was sure she didn’t even notice us kids, and other times we were just like the flies that stole in through the torn porch screen to be swatted. She seemed to retreat into what she called her “perfect world of books.”

“If only I were blind,” she said, “then I could learn Braille and shut out the ugly place this world has become and live in a more spiritual time. I am not unhappy that I have momentarily lost the use of my legs, because where should I go? There is no place where I want to be.”

Even while Sumter didn’t speak to me, I tagged after him when he went out to Neverland. I stood by and watched as he unlocked the door. But I didn’t follow him in; I knew he didn’t want me there.

I went to the beach with Julianne Sanders and my sisters for the next several days, leaving Sumter to his own devices. Like all children, I thought my family was the strangest one in the universe, and perhaps it truly was. The girls were generally spooked by the hallucinations we’d had two days before in the clubhouse, but Nonie thought it was all innocent enough: She figured the beer had gotten us going. “I read somewhere about mass hypnotism, and you know with the beer and our thumbs all bleeding, that’s probably what happened. Sumter is
such
a weirdo.” Missy tried to shush her because of the blood oath we’d taken. Although neither of them could quite remember what they had sworn to do, Missy was pretty sure it involved secrecy, and the twins were pretty good at keeping secrets, at least between each other.

“It’s not just hypnotism,” I said. “There’s something in that shack.”

Nonie clucked her tongue, “Well, it was kinda cool but kinda weird, too. More excitement than I expected in this place. You don’t think he did anything like give us LSD?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Acting smarter than everyone else was one of Nonie’s special talents. “It’s what hippies put in other people’s drinks so they’ll think they’re Superman and jump off buildings.”

“Watch the rocks,” Julianne warned us as we tromped down the chalk-white path along the bluffs. She was walking several feet ahead of us, ignoring our talk.

“I just wish there were some boys or something,” Nonie said just as we got to the end of the path. She was walking funny because her flip-flops had caused blisters on her big toes and she had wrapped her feet in Band-Aids and gauze. She told me it felt like she was walking on knives and she could feel each little pebble under her feet. Missy had one of my mother’s broad, straw sun hats as well as her sunglasses and had slathered her face with white creamy suntan lotion.

When we reached the gritty beach, we made camp. I thrust the striped red-and-yellow umbrella down deep and opened it while Julianne spread out the towels. “We can look for shark’s teeth,” she said, “and if we find enough, you can make a necklace.”

“You think there’s sharks?” Missy asked.

“I know it. Not man-eaters, but sharks. You notice I don’t go swimming in this water.”

“You let
us
go. Why’n’t you tell us about sharks before?”

“Your business if a shark takes a nip from your thigh. All those fishing boats chase the feeder fish in, and the bigger fish follow them, and then the sharks go for them. It’s to be expected. But I’d be less afraid of the sharks than the jellyfish.”

Missy nodded. “I got stung four times last year. It was worse than a bee sting.”

“And the crabs, you know the way they close their claws around your toes?” Julianne continued. “I know they can’t really hurt you, but it’s dang scary.”

“You’re just saying it so we won’t go in the water,” I huffed.

“I won’t deny it, but I’d think twice if I was you. It’s a foolish boy who goes in over his own head. There’s a whole world down there you can’t see.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t go in, how’re you ever supposed to find out what’s there?”

“You need to get bit by something before you know it’s got teeth? You need to cut your foot first before you put your shoes on?”

“Whether you put your shoes on or off, someday you get cut anyway.”

“Yeah, smart man, but you don’t
invite
it, do you? You don’t stick your hand in the beehive and you don’t walk across spikes, do you? You don’t dance in the fireplace or eat broken glass, do you?”

“I heard Gullahs do all of that.”

“You heard wrong, smart man, only
idiots
do it.”

“She’s got you there,” Nonie said. “But Julianne, you must not know Beau too well because he
does
all those things. When he was six he tried to eat a tin can and cut his mouth all up. We told him not to, but he did, anyway.”

Julianne raised her eyebrows and looked me over, up and down. “Well, now I see who you are, Beau. I see what you’re made of.”

“All right, who am I?”

“You’re the one who does the things you ain’t supposed to, just
because
you ain’t supposed to. Now, that Sumter, he’s something even more. He does the things he ain’t supposed to because he thinks it’s just what he’s
supposed
to do.”

“What’s the diff?”

“You know right from wrong, only you do wrong, anyway. It’s ’cause you’re curious, and curious means being contrary. But Sumter, he thinks nothing’s wrong. He thinks it’s
all
right. Boys like that never get much taller than four foot.”

“You mean like he won’t grow? How’s that gonna happen? Is he like a dwarf?”

“I mean like he’ll never reach his full height; I ain’t elaborating further. Now if you want to go out in that water, just be mindful of the crabs and jellyfish and sharks and anything else that’s out there that we don’t know about yet.” Julianne had brought a paperback down with her, and she opened it. “Now y’all just be careful. I got a good book and I aim to read this in peace without nobody drowning.”

I waded out into the water. It was cold. I glanced back to the beach and saw Missy waving to me. Nonie was lying on her stomach, facing the other way. Julianne had her book up to her face. The slight undertow sucked the
sand over and beneath my toes so that with every step my feet sunk lower and lower. Tiny blue mollusks rose and fell with the water, burrowing down deeper as each wave sloshed the shore. They moved all at once, as if they had rehearsed this movement a thousand times, and as the water slapped them, they went down, then the sand dissolved around them, and then more water hit and they tried to dig deeper. I bent down and picked one of the tiny shells up and tossed it far out into the sea.

I went in deeper and began dog-paddling in the cold water. I thought,
I will just swim out as far as I can.
I tried not to think about the sharks that Julianne may or may not have made up. I wondered what the sea creatures must think when they look up and see a boy swimming above them. What instinct kept them darting beneath rocks, what made them afraid? Where did fear come from? I thought,
If I were a crab, how would I know to be afraid of something larger than me? How would I know to run across the ocean floor, to get away? And if Sumter were a crab, would he run
toward
the thing he should be escaping?

It felt good to swim out. I turned my head around and looked back: Julianne and my sisters were just spots beneath the tiny umbrella, and the shore and the bluffs were the size of my fist. The trees up along the bluff near the Retreat were stalks, and Neverland was a smudge among them. I treaded water and watched to see if Sumter was up there near the shack. I was mad at him for what he had put us through the night before, for bringing whatever magic was there in Neverland out and into us.

“There is no Lucy,” I said aloud. “He made it all up.”

Julianne came down to the water’s edge and called me back in.

I felt something warm touch the heel of my foot in the cold water, and I almost panicked, not thinking of sharks, but of slaves bound together, floating with one will, toward a swampy peninsula.

I swam faster than I ever have since, back to land, back to the woman who called to me. When I was almost to shore, I saw a blur of movement up on the white path. It was Sumter. He was sitting on a rock and his hands were moving rapidly in front of him like he was beating some drum. Only
there was no drum. It looked almost like he was beating his fists into his lap. But I could not tell what he was doing, and as I just about made it to shore, a big wave crashed down around me and I went under. I saw, not the dark blue-green of water, but the white sand, whiter than what was on shore. My face was pushed by the undertow and the heavy water into the whiteness of the sand, and then I fought to come up. Seaweed was grasping at my ankles, trying to take me back out to sea, and when I tried to pull free, the seaweed clung more tightly, until it seemed as if it was not seaweed at all, but a half-dozen hands clutching me and pulling me down. Then, what seemed like another wave lifted me up by the shoulders. I was coughing and breathing and it was no wave at all but rather Julianne Sanders helping me back to my feet, slapping me between the shoulder blades to get water out of my lungs.

I lay on the sand, beneath the umbrella, and rested, while my sisters went exploring for seashells. Julianne glanced over at me every now and then as if she was meaning to say something to me. Finally I said to her, “You’re a
sinistre
.”

She didn’t seem surprised at all. “That’s what they call us.”

“I hear that you people are part Gullah and part something else.”

“Can’t always believe what folks’ll tell you. You get all the water out of your lungs?”

“Uh-huh. What’s the something else?”

Finally she looked annoyed, just like I was one of the horseflies that were nipping at her hairy legs. “I keep my business private, and you can keep yours private, too.”

“I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

“Oh, you didn’t?”

“No, Julianne. I was just wondering. I mean, there’s some things I don’t know about. Like with this island. Like why this would be a place where there’d be gods at all.”

“Maybe there ain’t a god in sight.”

“Maybe. But maybe there is.”

“And if there is, Beau?”

“Why here?”

“You got windows in your house, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Why are those windows where they are? Why are the doors there, and the stairs? Why’d the kitchen go in one place rather than where the bedrooms are?”